Third year: what you expected and how it really is.
1. Academic work
What you expect: To work hard and aim for a first.
Sunday evening is spent crying.
What actually happens: You spend nine hours in the library every day from Monday until Thursday every week. Each nine hours in the library only contains about three hours of work. Despite this, you give yourself Friday off as a reward. You spend the whole weekend desperately failing to finish the reading for your Monday seminar. Sunday evening is spent crying. You drop to a 2:2. You hate yourself.
2. Extra-curricular
What you expect: To makes the most out of your last year by getting involved in societies.
What actually happens: You haven't done any sport since the football trials in first year Freshers' week. The last time you did anything cultural was your GCSE art project. This was all going to change in third year. You were going to finally use your free time and find something to fill in the gaps in your CV. Instead, you do nothing. Again.
3. Going out
What you expect: To find some newm exciting places to go out and discover new music.
What actually happens: In second year, you moved on from Bunker Mondays and Friday SWX to abandon warehouses and the crack alleys of Stokes Croft. In doing so, you discovered some really sweet underground artists, like Loyle Carner aand Mac DeMarco. In third year, you hoped to further explore your new passions for sub-tropical tech house and collecting ugly tracksuits.
The rest of the academic year will be spent pretending to your parents that you are still applying for jobs.
Unfortunately, you will go to Mbargo Thursdays every week and nowhere else. You will spend forty minutes queuing in the rain before you eventually make it in. You will wait at the bar for fifteen minutes to buy jaegerbombs you can’t afford. You will then be physically assaulted by either some locals, or, if you are really lucky, Ben Stokes. At 12.30, you go home.
4. Being prepared for graduate life
The first three months of third year were spent applying for absolutely all of the banking internships available. Despite how much you wanted them, none of them wanted you. At this point you ran out of motivation and applied for a master’s. You didn’t get this either. The rest of the academic year will be spent pretending to your parents that you are still applying for jobs.
5. Becoming an adult
When you started at Bristol, you thought that after three years you would be independent and ready to start an exciting new chapter of your life. You still don’t know how to change a lightbulb.
Featured image: Flickr / Chris Blakeley
