The emergence of the global pandemic has had devastating effects on institutions of higher learning. In South Africa, many universities had to swiftly switch to online teaching and learning in a bid to mitigate the effects of the pandemic without considerable repercussion on the academic project. The paper investigates first-year undergraduate students’ experiences of induction as a critical phase of university transition at a South African university. The focus was to investigate how first-year undergraduate students transition into the unknown university environment as they come from various backgrounds. A case study research design was employed in the study. The population included first-year students across all schools in various areas of specialisation at the South African University. Given this population, a purposive sampling technique was employed in the study from which selected students to the tune of forty were interviewed. 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