Your first week
Welcome. First Six is here for exactly what its name says: the first six weeks, when everything is new and it is easy to fall behind before you have found your feet. This page gets you set up in about ten minutes, and points you at the few things worth doing in week one.
You do not need to do everything at once. Three things this week will carry most of the value: your timetable, your first check-in, and knowing where help is. Everything else can wait until you need it.
If you only do one thing today, import your timetable. It powers the Today view, which becomes the screen you actually open each morning. The rest of this page builds on it.
Set up your timetable
Open the Timetable tab. You can add classes by hand, but the fastest way is to import them.
- Find your classes
Most universities publish your timetable somewhere you can copy: a student portal or a PDF. Either works.
- Paste or import
In Timetable → Import, paste the text and First Six lays out a starter week. You can also add classes by hand, and later mirror your First Six timetable out to your phone's calendar. See Syncing to your phone calendar.
- Check the week, then save
The importer shows you every class before saving so you can fix a time, a name, or a room. Once it looks right, save, and each class repeats weekly.
Once your classes are in, the Today view shows what is on, what is next, and where you need to be, with a line that tracks the current time so you can see at a glance whether you are early or running late.
If your university does not give you anything easy to copy, you can add classes by hand once and they will repeat each week. The full walkthrough, including how to mirror First Six into Apple or Google Calendar, is in Importing from your university.
Do your first check-in
Once a week, First Six asks how you are going. It takes under a minute.
The check-in is a single, light question with a five-face scale, from "I need help" through to "I'm thriving". There are no wrong answers, and the point is simply to notice how a week actually felt, which is surprisingly easy to lose track of when every week is busy.
Staff mostly read patterns across a whole cohortOne run of the first six weeks for one group of students, usually your intake., and the support staff for your cohort can also see your individual responses so they can reach out. Every time someone opens your record it is logged. The page What staff see (and what they don't) explains exactly where that line sits.
If you pick I need help on the check-in, it takes you straight to the help flow rather than recording a score. That is by design: in that moment, getting you to a person matters more than logging a number.
Know where help lives
If a week gets hard, you do not have to figure out the right door. Open Help and raise a request in a sentence or two. It goes to the wellbeing team at your institution, and you will get a real reply, usually within a day.
If you are in crisis, do not wait for a reply. The Help screen surfaces immediate support the moment it is needed, including the crisis lines your institution has set up. You can reach Lifeline on 13 11 14 or call 000 in an emergency, any time. See the crisis path.
What happens next
That is week one. Over the following weeks the app introduces a little more as you go, following a six-week arc designed to match what tends to be hard, when. You do not need to read ahead; it will meet you where you are.
And when the six weeks are up, First Six does not disappear. It settles into an always-on companion for the rest of your degree. See after the first six weeks. If you are reading this before term even starts, before you start is the pre-arrival version of this page.
When you want to go deeper on any one piece, the rest of the student guide is here, and search (press /) will jump you straight to it.
Common first-week questions
Do I have to check in every week?
The check-in appears once a week and you can skip it for a few days if the timing is bad, but it is quick and it is the main way the team can tell when a cohort needs support. A minute a week is the whole ask.
Will my classmates or family see anything I enter?
No. Your classmates and family never see anything you enter. Check-ins go only to your university's support staff, and your private notes and tasks are visible only to you.
What if I don't have my timetable yet?
Add what you know and fill the rest in later, or skip it for now. Nothing else depends on a complete timetable; you can always import it once your university publishes it.
Related
The fastest answer is usually one question away.