In Freshers’ Week I was first in the queue for the NUS cards. I wasn’t sure why I was buying it (it’s £11 online from the NUS website), all I knew was that I was terribly afraid that I’d miss out if I didn’t. I was wrong. In fact, people always gave me a bemused look when I pulled out my NUS Extra card. “Why have you got that?” they’d ask, confused. And after a term of resolutely insisting I hadn’t wasted my money, I had to accept that I had. Whenever you need student discounts, your University card should work just as well in the city you live in. Even once I’d come home to the other end of the country they still, if a little reluctantly, accepted my University card instead of asking for the supposedly more widely accepted NUS extra card.
In our opinion the exclusive NUS discounts have got better over the last couple of years, but they’re still not good enough to justify buying their card unless you’ll be shopping at certain places fairly regularly. So hold back, wait until you’ve been at uni for a few weeks and see if you’ll actually be able to make use of the offers before you actually buy one.
Basically, my advice would be to check whether your university card has the NUS logo on it (or some text saying that you’re a member of the national union of students) – If it has, you should be able to use it as a NUS card at most places that offer student discounts – and if they don’t want to accept it don’t back down, you’ve definitely got reasonable grounds to argue your case for getting that 10% off.
