What they don’t tell you about your third year at uni.

First year is the year when you mess about, go out every night and miss lectures. Second year is when you buckle down a little bit more, you still leave it to last minute but you put the effort in and you still manage to go out once a week. Then there’s third year. They tell you that it’s hard and that there’s a lot more work so you have to focus and be organised.

What they don’t tell you is that it’s going to make you slightly insane.

Firstly, at every point in the day ‘I need to do work’ is in the back of your mind. You will procrastinate a lot and you find that you think cleaning the house or rearranging your wardrobe still counts as being productive. Productive will be a key word in your everyday life, ‘today I will be productive’ or ‘this week will be productive’ actually being productive is a bit more tricky.

As the year goes on you find that you’ve done a few assignments, but you’ve still got a long way to go before you can rest without feeling guilty, then you enter panic mode.

When writing your dissertation, you will cry. You will read other people’s and feel like it’s better than yours, you will write 3000 words and then decide that you hate it and so you start again and you will read your own work so many times that you don’t even know what you’re reading anymore. And then you’ll cry again.

You think that you don’t have enough time so you’re constantly panicking but procrastinating at the same time, you eat like there’s no tomorrow because chocolate makes you feel better and you will dream about your work.

So to sum it up, it’s ok to cry, it’s ok to eat and it’s ok to procrastinate (just not too much!)