It’s not just London that needs a bumper loan – students in Edinburgh are struggling too

Nothing puts more of a dampener on your first night with your home friends in months like finding out they're all paying so much less in rent than you – apart from maybe when the girl at LSE with the extra few thousand on her loan tells you she's only paying £110 more to live in Central London.

Edinburgh is hands down the UK's most expensive student city. This probably isn't a worry if you're one of almost a third of students at the University of Edinburgh who were privately educated, but for those who can't turn to the bank of Mum and Dad, there's a very real issue here. The financial insecurity of life as an Edinburgh student is at risk of driving less privileged students away.

How much???

Coming to the capital of Scotland where what once got you a round now doesn't even get you a drink was always going to be a culture shock – but there's no way to prepare for when you visit your friends and see they've got an entire room in their flat just for a pool table, whilst yours doesn't have a living room. Not to mention the regret you feel when you see the ones who didn't leave your hometown living in an eight bedroom mansion, where everyone has an en-suite – followed by a kick in the teeth when they tell you how little it costs.

More often than not, you realise you're paying a couple grand more than they are every year for a room that doesn't even have a carpet – even if you did find 20p in the floorboard cracks on move in day.

Happier times with my £2 pint

Nobody expects to live in luxury as a student, but "learning to budget" doesn't do much to change the fact that people who work 20 hours a week on top of their studies are still not making rent. This is just downright wrong. Working three jobs and having a flat you can see your own breath in because you can't afford heating isn't normal. Having your periods stop because your food budget doesn't allow the luxury of not being malnourished isn't "student life" – it's fucking poverty.

The unavoidable fact is that as an Edinburgh student, once you've waded through the flat viewings, faced more rejections than a Tory on Tinder and actually found a flat, you're likely gonna be paying upwards of £500 a month – if you're lucky. I spend my entire maintenance loan on rent, despite paying below market value in a flat owned by my flatmate's parents – and this isn't coming from some middle-class minimum loaner, I'm on bloody bursary.

Not exactly ideal

There's a rat race to live – except with mice, in a single glazed flat that you won't be able to heat even if your radiator actually works. Don't forget to get used to filling your freezer with tubs of batch cooked soup, because you now have the kind of diet that made the Guillotine famous.

Low income students shouldn't be debating going to lower ranked universities just because they know they'll be more financially secure. With nearly one in ten working class males dropping out, Student Finance need to realise that it doesn't cost the same to live in Bruntsfield as it does Bolton, and start acknowledging the pressures on students outside of London.