Leaving home is an adventure. Saying goodbye to the place that has kept you warm and safe for so many years and heading out into the big wide world. Moving to live near that dream university which has finally accepted you, after weeks and weeks of painstaking waiting for the letter to arrive, has got to be one of the most important milestones in any potential students life. My experience was no exception.

I had worked, tirelessly, for so many years to reach that moment. When I could clutch that acceptance letter in my hands the thought of actually having to leave filled me with nothing but excitement. So I’d never lived on my own or had to fend entirely for myself before, I was a big girl, and smart to boot, I was sure to pick it up quickly enough, wasn’t I? Besides the place I was heading to was known for its acclaimed university, it just had to be a haven for people like me. The ‘mean streets’ of Cambridge is hardly the picture that springs to mind when one thinks of it.

Unfortunately every town has a seedy underbelly. Some are just far better covered than others, and you never expect to be the one who'll find it.

I had rented myself a studio flat a short walk from the university campus; hadn't been quick enough with my application to land on-campus accommodation - perhaps there was the start of my streak of bad luck - when they say limited numbers available, believe me, they really do mean it.

The place was small and shabby looking. Hardly the Ritz, but it was cheap and on a student budget that was most important. The surrounding area was pretty grim too. Typically grey streets lined with matching houses and faded shop fronts. The odd grease encrusted café appeared here and there; spilling the smell of sausages and burned toast into the street. And there were second hand stores galore, their wares of cluttered junk piled high and overflowing onto the pavements.

Still, depressing picture or not, that was the place I would be calling home for at least a year, or so I thought. The bright side of it all? I was at university, and Cambridge of all places. It was what I had wished and worked long and hard for; so many years of my life given over to attaining this dream, and I was damn well going to make the best of it.

This upbeat attitude I’d had, unfortunately, didn’t last much past the first week of my moving in. The cramped little hole of a flat gave me no end of problems. The plumbing was bad, electricity liked to cut out, and the landlord couldn’t give two hoots; but god forbid if I didn’t pay my weekly rent on time.

The school year starting hadn't really helped any. Okay, so I spent less time cooped up in that little dump, but the workload I'd been set was mountainous. I could spend five-hour stints in the college library after lectures to try and tackle the work load, and this left me little time to do more than eat and sleep. Not exactly the student lifestyle I had been imagining. Yes I'd been expecting the work, and no I hadn't thought it would be easy, not considering how difficult Cambridge was to get accepted to, but I'd always thought students managed to find time to schedule some fun into their lives. I started to feel lucky if I had time to spend longer than ten minutes in the shower.

To make matters worse, what money I did have soon started to deplete. What with paying my weekly rent, bills and buying food, funds began to wear pretty thin. It was the last thing I wanted on top of everything else, and I had no idea where I was going to find the time unless they suddenly invented a 40 hour day, but I had to face up to the fact that I was going to have to get myself a job.

I suppose that is, really, where this story begins.

If variety is the spice of life, then my new neighbourhood was severely lacking in seasoning. My choices of employment, it seemed, were: the musty smelling charity shops, staffed by doddery old ladies with blue hair and chunky knit cardigans; or the greasy cafés, alongside spotty faced youths and sour looking managers; forever doomed to smell like bacon fat.

Not exactly a plethora of opportunity, but I’d wanted to find work close to my flat. The numbing hours of lectures left me lethargic, and I knew following that with yet more hours of tedious work for a meagre wage would leave me desperate to collapse in an exhausted heap. Oh and don't forget schedule in the mountains of research and essays somewhere too.

I had always thought myself an organised person, but this new university lifestyle told me otherwise. I had hoped that come the end of my first year at Cambridge I would have gotten a handle on it all. I suppose you could say that I did, I’m certainly not busy any more, though I would hardly call my life now the perfect balance of work, study and socialising. But I am jumping ahead of myself.

Eventually I figured that one of the cafés or restaurants would probably be my best choice of employment. While the second hand stores and charity shops might have been preferable, being less messy and grease smeared, they tended to favour volunteers over paid employees. While they’d probably have been happy to pay me for a short time, just as soon as someone came along looking to sacrifice their time 'for the good of mankind' and seeking nothing in return I’d probably be shoved back out onto the street. So the manual serving of food to customers it was, and prepare to smell of burgers and bacon fat for the rest of my student days I did.

It seemed preparing was all well and good, but actually landing a job in one of these places seemed surprisingly trickier than I’d ever have imagined. The slave driver managers that ruled over these places seemed to be fully aware of just how desperate local students were going to be for jobs in their greasy pits. They bartered with wages and took on only those willing to work the largest number of hours for the smallest pittance; nowhere near enough even to cover my weekly rent. I had reached an all time low at that point, surely there was no way I could sink to even lower depths?

On failing to secure any employment that would pay me a liveable wage, my first instinct was to call home, ask for some help. But could I really go crying to mummy and daddy when the first thing I’d done when I left was promise them that I could take care of myself? No, at that moment I was not yet ready to bite that bullet. Pride really is one of the deadly sins, because now I’m sure wishing that I had taken that chance.

Unable to land a job in even the shabbiest of the restaurants, I was stuck trawling the wanted ads for anything that looked even the slightest bit promising, but, with money wearing thin and the need to eat a decent meal becoming almost desperate, the future looked pretty bleak. What I wanted at that point, more than anything, was some good luck, to catch a break; so much so that when something finally did present itself it looked like a godsend. Too bad it was more like a one-way ticket to hell.

It presented itself at a fairly unlikely moment, during one of my long stints in the library as I tried to forget my financial issues and unemployment status whilst staring blindly at a linguistics paper I should have started some days previously. The grey, melancholy haze that had drifted over me was beginning to seep into everything I touched, and I knew that unless I found some way to dig myself out of that slump any future prospects I might have has were going to be rapidly flushed down the plughole. My Professors were, even then, showing signs of being pissed off with me. So when Beth came forward with an idea that had the potential to ease my money troubles, and potentially inject some fun into my life at the same time, I jumped at the chance; almost quite literally.

Beth was in my Literature class, and was one of the few people that I had shared my troubles with. As it turned out, I was not the only one suffering on hard times. It was, as could be expected, quite a common occurrence; especially among the first year students. However, she seemed to have had more luck than I did on the job front and said she’d speak with her supervisor about perhaps getting me on the payroll too -  which was apparently nicely lucrative, always a bonus.

I’d actually no idea where it was that she worked or what sort of thing that she did, and such was my desperation that I didn’t even care to ask. So, when she came to me with confirmation that they were willing to meet with me at the club and discuss possible employment, I really did jump for joy.

She’d said club which gave me some vague idea of what I might be doing. Bar work didn’t sound too bad. In fact, considering the other two options I’d been gifted with, it sounded positively glamorous. But the club, as it turned out, was not quite what I’d been expecting. It was noisy, smoke filled and dank; though why it paid so well was instantly obvious from the moment I stepped through the door.

I took a breath, looked at my surroundings and found myself posed with with a question that almost terrified me. Was I really willing to strip to pay my own way through university?