Starting at Royal Holloway: Your First Week

The first week at Royal Holloway comes with a long list of things you are apparently meant to have done, delivered in no particular order across emails, talks and a noticeboard. Most of it can wait. A small number of things genuinely cannot, because everything else depends on them. This is the short version, in the order that actually works.

The week one checklist

• Enrol on Campus Connect. Do this first. Nothing downstream works until it is done.
• Collect your student ID card. Building access, library, payments and SU membership in one card.
• Get onto eduroam. Your username plus @live.rhul.ac.uk, and your usual password.
• Log into Moodle and your student email once, early, while the IT Service Desk is quiet.
• Find your timetable and subscribe to it rather than re-checking a website every morning.
• Register with the campus GP surgery. Five minutes now, versus being ill and unregistered in November.

Societies, the gym, a bank account and a railcard are all week-two jobs. None of them has a deadline you can miss in your first seven days.

Enrolment and Campus Connect

Campus Connect is Royal Holloway's student record system, and enrolment runs through it online. It is the hinge that the rest of your account hangs off: your IT credentials, your student card, library borrowing, Moodle access and your official course registrations all flow from a completed enrolment. If you are locked out of something in week two, an incomplete enrolment is the first thing to check.

Instructions go to the email address on your application first, and then to your Royal Holloway email once that exists, so watch both in the run-up to term - including the junk folder, which catches a surprising amount of it. Once you are enrolled, the Study tab in Campus Connect lists the courses you are registered on. Look at it properly in week one rather than assuming: a registration error found now is a five-minute fix, and the same error found in week six is not.

Your student ID card

The card is issued from a passport-style photo you upload yourself, through the Enrolment section of Campus Connect, before you arrive. Students starting in September 2026 were asked for that photo by late August. Uploading it late does not stop you enrolling, but the card is printed from it, so a late photo means a late card.

It is worth more than an ID check. The same card is your access pass for campus buildings, your library card, your Students' Union membership, and a campus payment card you can load credit onto for food and printing. Practically, the card is what turns a locked door into an open one, so collecting it is a genuine week-one job rather than a formality.

Wifi: getting onto eduroam

Campus wifi is eduroam, the shared network used across UK and international universities. Connect to the eduroam network and sign in with:

• Username: your college username with the live domain appended, as [email protected]. The bare username on its own will not work.
• Password: your standard university password, the same one used everywhere else.

Two things worth knowing. First, eduroam is a useful diagnostic - if it accepts your credentials, your university account is working, so a Moodle or email failure is a problem with that service rather than with you. Second, because eduroam is a shared standard, the same login gets you online at most other UK universities and at many abroad, which is genuinely handy on a placement or a visit.

Moodle, your email and your timetable

These are three separate systems and confusing them is the single most common first-fortnight time sink.

• Moodle carries your teaching: materials, coursework and assignment marks. Courses often only appear when your department publishes them, so a thin-looking list in week one is normal rather than broken. The Royal Holloway Moodle guide covers logging in and what to do when a course is missing.
• Your student email is where the university sends anything that matters, including deadlines and registration problems. Put it on your phone in week one. A surprising number of week-six emergencies are week-two emails nobody read.
• Your timetable is a third system again, and it is not inside Moodle. The timetable guide covers where it lives, how to decode room codes like "EWD-1-04", and how to subscribe so it lands in your own calendar.

Registering with a doctor

There is a GP surgery on campus specifically for Royal Holloway students, and registering with it is the highest-value five minutes of your first week. You can register online through the NHS GP registration service rather than going in.

Eligibility depends on where you live. Halls of residence, Englefield Green and Egham all qualify, as do Old Windsor and parts of Virginia Water. If you live outside that area, register with a local practice instead - the NHS website will find your nearest. Either way, do it while you are well. Registering as a new patient when you are already ill, in the middle of a term, is a considerably worse experience.

For mental health and wellbeing support, both university and free UK-wide, the wellbeing and support guide covers what is available and how to reach it.

Money, banking and discounts

A UK student bank account is a week-two job, not a week-one one, but two things are worth knowing early. Banks ask for proof of student status, which usually means a letter you request through Campus Connect or student services - so start that before you go into a branch rather than after. There is a cashpoint outside the Students' Union building on campus, and the rest of the high-street branches are down in Egham town.

On discounts: a lot of student pricing runs off your university email address alone, so plenty of it works from day one with no card involved. Local Egham business deals are collected in the deals feature in RHUL Mobile, and second-hand kit that people are selling off within campus turns up in the student marketplace, which is usually the cheaper way to solve a missing kettle than the retail park.

Finding your way around

Royal Holloway's campus is 135 acres of parkland, and the buildings are not laid out on a grid or named in any pattern you can guess. Two practical notes for week one:

• Room codes name the building first. "EWD-1-04" is the Emily Wilding Davison Building, floor 1, room 04. Once you know the prefix, you know the building, and the building is the part you have to walk to.
• The network will be busy. Arrivals weekend puts hundreds of families on the same masts at the same time, which is precisely when you most need a map. The campus map in RHUL Mobile stores its map data and walking routes on the device, so it keeps routing with no signal at all.

What happens socially across the same week - the freshers fair, move-in, societies, the events worth prioritising - is covered in the Welcome Week guide. Which hall is which, and how far each sits from teaching, is in the halls guide.

Check the official pages

This is an independent guide, not an official Royal Holloway page, and deadlines and processes change between years. Campus Connect, your enrolment email and the university intranet are authoritative if anything here disagrees with them. Where a date matters - a photo deadline, an enrolment cut-off - confirm it against the official source rather than this page.