5 things about UCL that are scarier than any Halloween costume

Autumn– golden leaves falling to the ground, cosy autumn evenings, Taylor Swift’s Red album continuously on a loop, oh, and Halloween.

Whether yours will be a quiet one watching Hocus Pocus with a takeaway or puking into a cowboy hat on the tube home from the club, here’s 5 things about UCL that are way scarier than any Halloween costume you’ll see this year.

1. Prospective sabbatical officers grafting for your vote in the refectory

Voting Week 2024

If you don’t like Halloween, just remember it could always be worse. It could be March – you’re sitting in the Refectory furiously typing notes from a reading you forgot about, when you’re approached by an ever-hopeful prospective sabbatical officer with a QR code. You will make one of two choices – be pressured into fake-voting for them just so you can continue working or pretend to pick up an urgent phone call. Be prepared to do this all over again for a week straight.

2. Mully’s in the daytime

Since being repainted white, Mully’s has slightly lost its previous feeling of your old high school drama classroom – all the walls painted black, stinking of feet and VKs. Still, it just feels a bit unnatural being in Mully’s in the daytime. Those permanently sticky floors aren’t meant to see the light of day.

3. Almost getting your phone stolen in Gower Street Waterstones

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Gower Street Waterstones is an undoubtedly beautiful bookshop that every UCL student is likely to have marvelled at – a Grade II listed gothic building with five floors, featuring a café, vinyl store, and an analogue photobooth. An ideal study spot until someone slides a newspaper over your phone and almost takes it. Note – don’t leave personal belongings on the table!

4. Group projects

100 per cent of your module grade being reliant on a group project is a scary prospect. Get ready for unanswered messages, borderline begging your teammates to do their work on time, and gritting your teeth after they take a break from working to go for “lunch” and never return. Count your days.

5. Exam season in the Student Centre

via Instagram

It’s a fact of life that students leave assignments until the last minute. After all, if you only give yourself a day to complete something, it only takes a day to do! This logic holds strong until you enter the Student Centre and realise, with a creeping sense of dread, that you have made a fatal error in judgement. All that free time “mentally preparing” for assignments has come back to haunt you – a feeling much scarier than any Halloween costume could be.

During this experience, you may be lucky enough to share a table with people calmly referencing their “family flat in Fitzrovia”, or others having a competition to see who can say the word Labubu the loudest. Escape this by heading to the ground floor, making awkward eye contact with Jeremy Bentham’s vacant stare, and reminding yourself a UCL degree might potentially be worth it in the end.