Hey, I'm a first year university student.
I didn't take the loan, just the grant and luckily my parents paid for my accommodation but my household income was in the higher bracket. Yeah, the service isn't always fair (in my opinion it could be worst) but yeah.
My advice is that no matter what you truly need to know how to manage your money, you need to calculate and not just spend in the first few weeks, I had friends who had a huge amount of loan money handed to them, the maximum and the grant also but still ended up having money troubles, sometimes it's not about how much money you have but the way you spend it, get into the habit of saving especially, it helps out in the long run.
Hopefully your university will also have programs in place to help you out also, they may give out bursaries (no special condition ones) and they could have helpful services to help you get by.