The title of this post almost sounds like I am boasting about visiting a place, which I guess I am, but the more important thing is that those of you living out North, might find UniHub Playford a home away from home.

What is it? 🤔

If you live in the northern suburbs of Adelaide and are studying at university, there is a resource you may not know about yet: Uni Hub Playford.

Uni Hub Playford is a local study hub for university students, located at the TAFE SA Elizabeth campus. It provides a quiet, supportive place to study along with practical resources that can make university life a little easier.

Importantly, Uni Hub Playford is not a university itself and it doesn’t deliver courses. Instead, it supports students who are already enrolled at universities — including Flinders — by giving them a space and community to help them succeed in their studies.

The idea behind the hub is simple: studying at university can be challenging, especially if you live a long way from campus or are balancing work, family, and other commitments. Having a dedicated place nearby where you can focus on study and connect with other students can make a big difference.

At Uni Hub Playford, students can access things like:

• Quiet study spaces

• Meeting rooms for group work

• High-speed internet and computer access

• Workshops and student support activities

• A community of other university students studying locally

The hub is part of the Australian Government’s Suburban University Study Hubs program, which aims to make higher education more accessible by supporting students to study closer to where they live.

Uni Hub Playford is run by the City of Playford, in partnership with local education providers including Flinders University, the University of Adelaide, and TAFE SA.

In short, it’s a shared study space and support hub for university students in northern Adelaide — designed to make studying a little more accessible and a little less isolating.

Why/how you might use it 😲

As universities put more and more learning online, the temptation to do most of your study from home increases.

Some people handle this shift quite well. Perhaps they have an office or study space that is separate from the rest of their home, so they can create a divide between their study life and the rest of their life. Perhaps they like the quiet or isolation.

But not all students have the physical luxury of a dedicated study space at home, or the learned practices of separating study and life.

For those students, spaces like Uni Hub Playford can be really useful. You can treat it as a workplace — a way of putting some space between your study life and the rest of your life.

That might look like scheduling yourself to be there at certain hours. For example:

“I’ll go on Monday, Tuesday and Friday from 10am to 3pm.”

Making this commitment means going through all the little rituals of “getting ready for work”. When you arrive, the environment naturally prompts quiet study and focused work. And during those hours, the focus is clear: study.

Then when you go home, you can mentally leave the study behind.

In some ways it’s similar to visiting a local library to work. You go there with the purpose of studying, and when you leave, you can let go of the work for the day.

When I visited the space with Mel (Student Success and Wellbeing Advisor), I got a nice vibe from it. I realise ‘vibe’ isn’t exactly a helpful term, but I tend to quickly get a sense of whether a place is somewhere I’d like to visit again, or I am happy to see it just once. In this case it was the former.

There are plenty of little nooks to study in, along with different consultation and meeting rooms.

You’re also more likely to run into other students there, and perhaps even make a friend. They’ll likely be in a situation similar to you. And because the hub is open to students from multiple universities, you might end up building quite a diverse network.

If you live in the northern suburbs and it sometimes feels like a bit too much effort to get into the City Campus, this is a really good option.

On the practical front, parking seemed good. I didn’t check what the situation was with food nearby, so you might want to bring lunch just in case.

During business hours there are also staff there. We met Erin and Christie (👋) when we visited and they were lovely, which means there are friendly people around to welcome you and help out if needed.

One of the things students who study mostly online can miss out on is the sense of belonging that comes with having a “campus” — rocking up to the same place each week, seeing familiar faces, interacting with staff, noticing posters and opportunities, and accessing physical resources.

If getting into the City or Bedford Park campuses is a bit of a stretch because you live or work out north, Uni Hub Playford could become your quasi-campus.

All of this is a long way of saying: check it out. See if it might be a study home for you, and if it is, lock it into your diary.