From the moment you set foot into halls you’re warned to make the most of it, as by the time that third year hits you’re going to forget the meaning of fun.

Misled by the allure of the forty percent pass rate and a complete lack of necessity to attend any lectures, you feel university really can’t be THAT difficult. You doss your way through second year with a similarly minimal amount of effort, telling yourself a dissertation will probably only take you a couple of days to do.

Then third year hits you like a London Midland train.

1) You’ve cried on campus

You have 2500 words to do before the end of the week, you’ve been working on the same essay for the past month and you haven’t had more than four hours sleep a night for as long as you can remember. All of these factors lead you to take yourself aside for a moment and have a good long weep in one of the uni’s many toilet cubicles.

2) You view going to the Sydney Jones as a social gathering

When work gets serious, it’s all about finding those hidden gems around campus. The unknown rooms where you can sit in isolation for hours with your head buried deep in an ancient book on Feminism without being disturbed by noisy eaters. When you want some human interaction, you don’t head to The Font as you once did.

No no, you have a five minute cigarette outside the library, moan to some friends about how much work you have to do and then head straight back to that laptop.

3) You can’t remember the last time you went to the Raz

The club was exceeding the limit of people it could let in

Once upon a time, the Raz was your guilty pleasure. Every Monday you’d hop on the 699 and indulge in some fat frogs and cheesy dancing without a care in the world. Nowadays, you’ve got a seminar at ten on a Tuesday that you won’t even consider skipping and you’re in the library far too late to get there before the queue anyway.

4) You feel guilty about going to the pub

Long gone are the days when going to the pub was just part and parcel of your journey home. Now you’ve hit third year any trip to the pub just involves a group of you sitting there worrying about your next deadline and attempting not to have one too many for fear of ending up in town.

5) Weekends actually have a significance

During first and second years you rarely had any idea whether it was Tuesday or Saturday. However, due to your valiant attempts to attend the majority of your lectures this year and the incessant workload that you find yourself under, weekday antics are simply not an option anymore. What this means is that quite literally everybody you know can be found in Heebies’ smoking area on a Friday night, drowning their sorrows and praying that Monday doesn’t come too soon.

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