Stay in Touch with Family and Friends
You need to find ways to stay in touch with family and friends while you are at University, and they will want to stay in touch with you too. Studying at college or university may well be the first time you have lived away from home and may also the first time you have been overseas. It can be a daunting experience even for the most confident students. There will be times when you feel lonely, so having an easy, low cost way to stay in touch with family and friends will be very comforting. Being a student (and therefore a switched-on member of the 'wired-world'!), you will already know about low cost methods of cmmunication such as Windows Live Messenger, social networking sites like Facebook and SMS (text) messaging. But how about your parents and other family members - do they know where and how to find you on the World-Wide-Web and your get your messages? It may be worth reading through this page and agree with your family and friends what methods you will use to stay in touch. Make sure they get some practice at using new methods before you leave for the UK! The UK has very high-tech, reliable systems to enable communication to happen easily, though costs can vary significantly. Here are some of the most popular methods of staying in touch:
Most students have their own mobile telephone. However, it can be very expensive to make calls from the UK using a phone registered in another country. It is usually possible for students to buy a UK sim card for their phone which will allow them to make low cost telephone calls to their family and freinds both in the UK and overseas. All the major mobile telephone networks offer a variety of packages for making overseas calls. For example: Orange Telecoms offer a sim - only service for overseas calls from 5p per minute. Other service providers such as O2, Vodafone and 3 Telecoms offer rival products.
It may also be possible to have a home telephone service installed in your accommodation , and again there are a variety of services available at varying cost levels. The national telephone service supplier BT can provide this kind of service throughout the UK. LOW COST ACCESS NUMBERS There are also many Telecom Companies offering a pre-dial service for low cost international calls. In this case , you can use any UK telephone , mobile or home phone to call an access number followed by the number of the person you wish to call. The call is routed through the low cost access number at very favourable rates, sometimes as low as 2p per minute. Companies offering this service are: Stay in touch with family and friends using Cherry Call Stay in touch with low cost Just-Dial INTERNET Most UK colleges, universities and local libraries offer internet usage either free of charge or at low cost. You can use their desktop P.C’s or your own laptop via their WiFi link. You will also find FREE WiFi links in some stores and cafes such as MacDonalds and Starbucks. If you wish to have internet usage in your own accommodation and it's not already available, you can arrange your own Broadband connection from one of the many UK Broadband Internet providers. See the link below.
Email is now a universally accepted form of communication that works well across different time zones. If you or members of your family are not familiar with email, we suggest asking a person who is for help in setting up a FREE email account. You can set one up for free with the popular search engines such as:
Chat programs such as Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger make it easy to chat with friends and family in ‘real time’ for FREE, and with sound and picture if you wish using a webcam and microphone.
Skype offer Voice over Internet (VOIP) calls for free using a high speed internet connection (known as Broadband in the UK). You can buy headsets with built in microphone and even telephone handsets that work with Skype. In addition to free chat when both parties use a computer, you can also buy time from Skype to make calls from your computer to an existing telephone. Parents, family and friends not too familiar with chat programs may prefer this method as for them it will feel very much like using a telephone.
If you are already a user of one of the many Social Networking sites, you may like to tell your family and friends how they can stay in touch with your adventures (assuming you are happy for them to know about those!) and see pictures of your new life as a student. There are so many of these sites, but perhaps the two best known are MySpace and Facebook. Before you leave for the UK, you may need to set up an account for family members who are not too familiar with these sites and show them how to use them!
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