Freshers' Week 2026 was a whirlwind of incredible activity! We delivered our biggest Freshers' Week EVER, with more events and more opportunities to connect and make Surrey feel like home. We've loved meeting so many of you - both new students and returners - and we hope you enjoyed Freshers' Week as much as we did! We're really proud of what we've achieved for students during September so far, so keep reading to see what we've been up to. 

Your Belonging

• Over 100 students volunteered to become Freshers’ Angels, helping thousands of new students move in over Moving In weekend, and volunteering at events and campus tours throughout Freshers’ Week.
• Freshers’ Week kicked off with Freshers’ Fest at the Lake, complete with food, drinks, music, and games. We gave out 1000 vouchers for free food to students!
• Over 2,000 tickets were sold to over 900 students across 20 Belonging events already held so far this semester. 53% of ticket holders were first-year students, and another 30% were PGT students, showing how important these events are for welcoming new students to Surrey.
• Over 112 events were promoted on our What’s On calendar over a 12 day period, including several events hosted by our Clubs and Societies.
• We sold 320 tickets to our Campus Tours, with even more students tagging along after they’d started!
• We ended Freshers’ Week by welcoming over 6,000 attendees and stall holders to Freshers’ Fair, the biggest event of the week. We gave out 3500 goody bags, and had over 3000 prizes on offer to be won at our main Union stall!
• 44 sports were on offer for free taster sessions during two days of Active Freshers over the final weekend of Freshers’ Week, hosted at Surrey Sports Park.
• During the week, we ran 10 nightlife events at Rubix, and sold over 11,200 tickets across the week!

Your Support

• We re-launched Welfare Watch with 3 shifts during Freshers’ Week. Two of these shifts were run in collaboration with Clubs & Societies, one with Disney Society and one with Snowsports. Our volunteers also gave out 1260 pancakes to students at Rubix!
• We’ve advised on over 400 student cases during the Late Summer Assessment and over the results period, providing academic advice on Extenuating Circumstances, appeals, and more.
• We’ve also provided housing advice on over 65 cases since August, helping students facing issues in their private accommodation and helping connect students to find available housing.
• We gave out over 500 free condoms at Freshers’ Fair, and promoted a range of support services to students.

Your Education

• We launched our new Rep Feedback Platform which has also been promoted at Welcome Talks, with feedback already coming in from students!
• Our Sabbatical Officers have attended several of these Welcome Talks to greet new students and share an overview of what Surrey life is all about, whilst promoting the importance of sharing academic feedback with the Union via Course Reps.
• Course Rep Elections have now started, with more than 750 positions up for grabs across the University.
• Our new group of Head Reps have also started in their roles, taking on leadership positions within their Schools.

Your Voice

• Our Student Equality Networks delivered their first Society collaboration of the year, running an inclusive craft event with AutiSoc, and sharing advice for new Autistic students in a My Lived Experience blog post.
• The Equality Network has also supported a number of our Belonging Events aimed at welcoming new International students, including an International Café and a postcard decorating event.
• Our new 8 Part-time Officers across our Zones have started in their roles, making connections with students and preparing for Officer training.
• We’ve supported Clubs & Societies by running bye-elections for over 90 signatory positions over September.

Your Future

• We trained over 160 Wellbeing Champions to provide support and advice to Club and Society members.
• We’ve had over 870 applications to a range of paid part-time student staff roles on offer at the Union, with roles available in our venues and supporting Union projects.  
• Over 55 students applied to become Student Trainers as part of our Destination Success programme, and will soon be trained to deliver free employability workshops!
• We also received 200 applications to our 6 leadership positions in our Student Equality Networks.
• We ran two conferences for Society and Sports Club committees, with over 120 students attending our Team Surrey conference.

Your Union

• We launched our new outreach project, Union2U, hosting our first outreach stall at Freshers’ Fest and giving students an opportunity to meet their Sabbatical Officers!
• We’ve sold over 12,000 products on our website so far this academic year, not including tickets for events at Rubix! Over 3,000 of these products are memberships to Clubs and Societies so far this year.
• We ran a successful welcome marketing campaign, reaching over 2.5 million views on Instagram and over 10,000 visitors to our Freshers’ mini-site since A-Level results day.
• Our website reached 529,000 total pageviews during our welcome campaign, and 236,000 pageviews from 39,100 unique visitors during Freshers’ Week alone!

What a week! We hope that everything we offered you during Freshers' Week helped you start off your Surrey life in the best way possible, and we're so excited to keep bringing you the opportunities and events that you want to see this year.