Having returned to the LSE an older, wiser, more experienced person, I feel compelled to pass on my words of wisdom to eager would-be LSE students. These are all things that you most definitely should not do in your first term.
Do not:
1. Wake up on Sundays at 11 am and decide just to wait for the catered dinner because a) you’re lazy to cook and b) you have no money. You will be very irritable for the next seven and a half hours and your roommates will not appreciate it.
2. Do your Maths homework on 9 am on the day that it is due. You will probably forget to hand it in at 10:30 and get a “?” on your LSE4You record, disrupting the perfect row of VGs.
3. Do your essay in concentrated 8-hour bursts. You will suffer from burnout for the whole of the next week.
4. Go to lectures if you know you’re going to fall asleep in them anyway. There is no point going to EC102. You will fall asleep twenty minutes in and wake up at the end groggy and disoriented.
5. Sign up to all the societies that look interesting. Just like them on Facebook and try out their fun-sounding events. Or else you get twenty emails on Sunday evening, all of which you have to promptly delete.
6. Go to Saucy, swear you’ll never go again, and go anyway. Saucy might be an LSE rite-of-passage, but is it really worth the hangovers which mean that you never get anything done until Saturday 6pm?
7. Swear you’re going to bed and sit outside your room talking to your hallmates until 3 am. It makes it very difficult to stay awake in the aforementioned EC102 lecture.
8. Forget to bring your umbrella anywhere. You will get soaked.
9. Lose your student ID card, get a new one, and lose it on the same day again. You’ll have to suffer the embarrassment of a knowing glance from the man at the Student Services centre who fetches a new ID card for you for the second time in a week.
10. Forget your library book in Malaysia, which is from the Course Collection, meaning that you have to renew it once every three days until the time that you fly back to retrieve it.
