The Erasmus Trap: Why Week One Is Easy and Week Four Isn't

Valencia pulls in more than 3,000 international students a year for Erasmus and exchange programs, and if you're one of the ones arriving in the next few weeks, you're about to have an incredible first seven days. Welcome Week is real, it's organized, and it works: orientation sessions, a Spanish night with paella at Marbella Club, ESN beach days, language exchanges, someone from a WhatsApp group you joined three days ago already inviting you to pre-drinks. For one week, meeting people is basically automated.

Then the semester actually starts.

The Part Nobody Warns You About

Here's what tends to happen next, almost like clockwork: the organized welcome events taper off right as lectures begin, and the "friend group" that formed in week one — usually whoever you happened to be standing next to at a party, not necessarily people you'd have picked — starts to calcify. By week three or four, plans are already being made in group chats you're not in. Not out of malice. It's just what happens when twenty-somethings meet fast and default to whoever's convenient.

The cruel part is the timing. Week one, everyone is equally new and equally eager, so approaching anyone feels low-risk. Week four, people already have a group, and inserting yourself into an established one feels much harder than it actually is — even though most of those "established" groups are only three weeks old themselves.

• The easiest week to make friends is the first one — take it more seriously than it feels like it deserves
• Don't lock in with the first group you meet just because leaving feels awkward later
• Keep saying yes to new things through week four and five, not just orientation week

The friend group that forms in week one is an accident. The one that lasts the semester is a choice you keep making in week three, four, and five.

What To Do About It

If you're arriving for the autumn semester, the practical move is to treat the first month as ongoing, not a single event. ESN and university orientation cover the first week well — that part's already handled for you. The gap is everything after: the weeks when the organized stuff thins out but you're still, genuinely, trying to figure out who your people are here.

That's the exact gap Nexo exists to fill. Not another orientation party, but a recurring reason to keep showing up around a genuinely mixed crowd — other exchange students, but also digital nomads, expats who've been here longer, and Valencia locals — so your circle isn't limited to whoever else happened to sign up for the same exchange program as you.

Cost of living here runs somewhere around 700-900 euros a month, which is manageable enough that the actual scarce resource isn't money — it's time before the semester routine sets in and everyone's schedule gets harder to coordinate. Use the easy weeks while they're still easy.