1. The Library is a Bloodbath
After finally having discovered the 9 digit long number, identified the right floor and scoured the shelves doggedly often all that is found is a sad gap where our prized book should be. There’s a shuffle and through the shelves you catch a glimpse of someone in your seminar group shuffling away laden with, what you convince yourself, are all the books you need. The four hour loan section is the only safe haven, but even then it’s a tense wait when the clock strikes 4.56 and your book is yet to arrive.
2. You become the most selfish academic
Although you despise those fellow students who seem to hoard vast shelves of prime reading, it does not hold you back from doing the same. If, by some miracle, summative work begins over a week in advance to the deadline, you take pride in amassing Tesco bag loads of all books even vaguely related to your question. In seminars it’s all laughs and smiles in seminars but underneath there lies a disconcerting awareness of the fight for the death that awaits us in the last term.
3. You have been defeated by Architecture
There is not one student that fully understands the history building. It’s a mystery as to how many floors or staircases there actually are. Finding a new room is a tense occasion, particularly in freshers week where bleary eyed students ambled aimlessly in circles, unable to navigate a building that resembles an Escher painting.
4. You have incredibly niche pockets of obscure knowledge that you will probably never need
Unbelievably specific essay titles take you down avenues that you weren’t even aware were academic fields of study. There’s a certain satisfaction in accumulating odd fragments of knowledge, the only issue being is that I can’t expect Jazz in 1940s Johannesburg or the diet of farmers in early modern Essex to crop in conversation any time soon.