FRESHER
OMG you’re so stressed. Terror, thy name is prelim. You’ve never known panic like this; the end is nigh, the walls are closing in – is this what waterboarding feels like?
Freshers, get over yourselves. This is the academic equivalent of moaning to the homeless about how your bedroom in Cowley next year is a bit smaller than your one at home. Even if half the time you claim to be revising wasn’t spent trawling through the petty arguments on Oxford Overheard, your problems are still few and far between. Calm down, take a deep breath, and get memorising your ‘Introduction to’ whatever.
Morning:
You set your alarm for earlier than you have done throughout the rest of the year as a symbolic display of your newfound nose to the grindstone mentality. You then spend a couple of hours faffing because you got up so early. You have never made any attempt to reach out an arm of friendly human contact to your scout for two and a half terms, but suddenly you’re striking up conversations with the express incentive to make them last as long as possible and she has quickly become half-confidante, half-saviour.
Lunchtime:
You spend at least a good hour discussing with friends and colleagues about how stressful everything is. So-and-so’s made mind-maps on each key concept. This makes you feel highly inadequate, but what you don’t realise is that the majority of time that will have taken was spent in the queue at W.H.Smith’s buying pretty highlighters. You head to the library, competitive instincts at the peak of stimulation.
Evening:
You suddenly realise that you haven’t done anything remotely work-related all day thanks to internet distractions and the decision to go for a run in the afternoon (the tenuous justification of ‘healthy in body, healthy in mind’ conveniently ignoring the fact that you have never exercised until you had no other revision get-outs left). A few hours are spent trawling through textbooks wishing more of your first year was spent taking in relevant examples and bringing new ideas to the table, not taking in Jagerbombs and bringing new people home for a fumble.
Do not worry, fresher. All is not lost.
FREE
The envy of the rest of the University, you have managed to find a course that doesn’t examine every year. Well done you. Scientists want to be you, finalists want to kill you. Crack open the Pimm’s and the croquet set and prepare your best condescending ‘oh poor you’ face for when anyone else drags their way out of the library to try and feed off your mood of comparative calm. Don’t try any ‘yeh well I still have two essays a week’ garbage – trust me it will not go down well. Most of your time is spent coming up with ways of doing as little of your extra-curricular duties as possible; there is an opportunity for free time and you will make the most of it. That’s if watching The Apprentice and trawling through Buzzfeed is making the most of it.
Morning:
What is this? Breakfast usually consists of something quickly grabbed and cobbled together before lectures (or instead of lectures for those who take their lack of exams very seriously). The first few hours of the day are spent leisurely deciding how much nothing can be fitted into so many open hours.
Lunchtime:
This is your first real social contact after crawling out of bed at some double-figured hour. Hoorah for a chance to catch up with others who are similarly resented by those in surrounding years. Maybe if you all grinned and frolicked very visibly just outside the library, those with exams will like you more? What about talking really loudly about what fun you had last night or your plans for the weekend? Hatred for you has well-and-truly reached its saturation point, so why not?
Evening:
Beer gardens are your new habitat, Kopparberg your fuel. If you’re not pleasantly tipsy by half 9 each night then you’re doing something wrong. Going out is less preferable, as by this time even Park End is beginning to resemble a desolate wasteland, but hey – more drink makes up for lack of people. It is known, khaleesi. Just enjoy your fleeting freedom while you have it.
FINALIST
Life is tough. The light at the end of the tunnel is worryingly flickery and you swear the tunnel is longer than last time you looked. Enjoyment is a thing of the past and you reminisce about better days, days of freedom and laughter and punting, as you observe the Trinity sun from the clinical confines of a library. You’re reasonably certain Candle in the Wind was actually about you. One more article on a really obscure area of one of your subsidiary papers and you may just put plans into action and fake your own death. Oh why did you only read the abstracts when writing essay notes? It really doesn’t help that recent revision classes have opened up huge parts of the course that your tutor impressively failed to mention the first time around.
Morning:
You get up at a time that even rowers might deem a tad early. Breakfast consists of muesli – the cereal equivalent of a hair shirt. Subsequent migration to the library, where no matter how numerous the pissy e-mails from the librarian banning seat-hogging, you sit in YOUR seat, which is marked by a pile of textbooks, a startlingly aggressive territorial note to pesky prelims revisers and the stale aroma of dread.
Lunchtime:
This is the hour in which you can justify it to yourself that it’s alright to go walkabout. Depending on your mood, sitting in a communal space to eat with people who still have smiles on their faces and life behind their eyes could be a welcome break from oblivion, but is often just an unwelcome reminder of others’ existence. Cue eating alone and glancing over at those who can still experience joy making constant “snackemfrackem” noises a la Mutley.
Evening:
Many would covet the opportunity to watch the sun set over the dreaming spires every day, however when shielded by the thick glass of the library (there’s probably something symbolic there but you’re too mentally exhausted to come up with it) it doesn’t really enjoy the same panache. As you turn on your desk-lamp and face another good few hours of book-hitting, the clicking of keyboards from fellow captives around you spell out the Morse code for “Dignitas”.
