Congratulations to you, you offer holder (or if you are in the process of making your application, all the very best to you)! I am sure you have spent countless days crafting and perfecting your Statement of Purpose and going over all your documents. All of that has paid off and now it’s time to start preparing after your acceptance of your offer from LSE. This blog is the second edition of answers to the question “what are the many things I have to do once I decide to… accept my offer?”.

In Blog 1, we went through four important aspects that answer the aforementioned question: things to do for conditional vs unconditional offers, applying for scholarships, searching for accommodation and going through the offer booklet (relevant parts). This second part attempts to go through the next three important steps to take in your preparation to accept the offer.

5) Make a list for packing + things to buy

Now’s as good a time as any to start your preparation to move, if you intend to move out. I personally am an international student who had to shift countries in the middle of the pandemic. I was also working at the time, so planning was something I had to do in advance to get through the humongous list of things to prep and buy. If you are in school or working like I was, the whole packing and moving process might be even more exhausting than it normally would be. The easiest way out? Make a master list of all the things you need to pack and buy. I personally had a spreadsheet full of items divided into categories like “home”, “apparel”, “kitchen”, etc. This might sound exhaustive, but it clears up so much mental space once done because you will no longer have to keep a track of all of this mentally. You need not reinvent the wheel, though! LSE alumni from your country/city/course would most likely have packing lists that they might be willing to share. That is how I compiled mine and it was such a blessing.

6) Make milestones

With a million of things to do, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. A good way to change this is to simply divide your time into chunks using milestones. Classify all the important things that have to be done into important steps, and allocate dates to them, the last one possibly being on the last day of the timeline. For example, in my personal sheet (image seen here), I input nine important steps to be done before I left my home country, and allocated timelines to each. This way, I knew what needed to be done and by when it had to be done. This cleared out my impulsive need to try and do everything at the same time, leading to nothing being done efficiently or even well.

Top tip: Think about all the major aspects that need to be done. Write them down in a list on a paper or on the computer. Spread this out across your timeline based on priority and then assign dates to each.

7) Visa

This one will not be applicable to everyone, so if you don’t need this, take a sigh of relief and head on out to tick off the other things from your “to do” list. On the other hand, if like myself, you are a foreign national who needs a (student) visa to study in the UK, prepare to start working on that! I am sure that you have started looking into the process long before, or potentially just after the offer letter arrived, but now it’s time to push this into full motion. With the multitude of documents this requires and the time it takes to complete each step, I think milestones are necessary for the visa application as well. So making a checklist of all the documents you need, the steps to follow, and a timeframe for each will be helpful in keeping track of where things are through those weeks.

Top tip: Reach out to the LSE Visa Information service for tips, if you are stuck.

At the end of the day, what got me through this list of chores was knowing that I was going to be doing a course for which I had been working hard for over six months. So, take breaks through all of this to breathe and enjoy where you are. Congratulations if you have already received your offer and all the very best!