Advice/experiences about sharing a kitchen?

When I arrived at my halls, there were two flatmates living there already. The first flatmate I met said that they had decided to dedicate a shelf for each flatmate, and a section of the fridge/freezer for each flatmate too. Generally we had our own kitchen equipment, although we shared a kettle and toaster that one of the flatmates had bought. We cooked for ourselves and did our own washing up, but if you become close with your flatmates, you might cook for each other or cook together!

I'm really nervous about sharing a kitchen (and a flat in general) with strangers. I don't know anybody who's been to uni so I have no one to ask for advice.

When do you allocate kitchen space - who each cupboard or fridge/freezer shelf "belongs" too? Do you all agree upon this or do people kind of just put their stuff where they want? And are the cupboards/shelves labelled? When it comes to cooking, does everyone just cook for themselves?

Sorry for all the questions!

Thank you for your reply! Were there just 3 of you then? Did you get along quite well?

my advice to you is if you like yoghurt (or anything like that i suppose) buy the cheapest one you can find, tesco value if poss. i dont know why, but in terms of things going "missing" it always seems to be yoghurt.

things will get stolen 5/6 times a year, so in terms of going 'up the wall' you should benchmark your number of stolen food items against that.

also try to go easy about milk, i'd never steal most things but i was partial to putting a little drop of someone's milk in my tea when absolutely desperate