Through the eyes of your favorite grad <3

There’s a strange moment in December at LSE:  that hazy, liminal stretch where it feels like the term should be over, but somehow… it isn’t. You’re half running on caffeine, half on autopilot, caught between essay deadlines and the siren call of Christmas markets.

You tell yourself, “Just one more week.” But one week becomes two, your group chat is full of “are we submitting on Moodle or Turnitin,” and your flat has turned into a symphony of stressed typing and towers of takeout boxes.

For undergrads, this is still the season of cute cozy jumpers and parties, skating at Somerset House, and glitter eyeliner that somehow ends up on everything. For postgrads, though, December is a different kind of blur. You’ve seen this before: the rush, the burnout, the countless countdowns, and now you’re watching it from a distance, quietly doing the math on how many words you can write before your next coffee refill.

You’ve been there, done the last-minute essays written between Christmas drinks, the frantic need to join every social event as if that would fill the term-shaped exhaustion. Now, it’s different. You’re not lost in the crowd anymore. You came back to student life with intention: knowing what you want from it, what you don’t, and how to tell the difference. You don’t need to chase every invitation or justify why you’d rather stay in with a cup of tea and a mind that finally feels like it’s your own again. 

You’re not jaded, just… aware. You’ve learned that the “break” never fully breaks. There’s always a reading to catch up on, a research idea to chase, or a new project you convince yourself is “light work” (spoiler: it’s not).

So you start to treat it differently. You rest with purpose. You go on walks, long and aimless, maybe even take the 45 minute train to Cambridge and find the definition of dark academia serenity. You catch up with friends who are in the same rhythm, the ones who understand that you can be both tired and deeply grateful at once. This isn’t about slowing down because you’re burnt out, it’s about slowing down because you’ve finally learned how to pace yourself. You’re not rebuilding from scratch; you’re continuing the work.

Still, somewhere between the deadlines and the decorations, a kind of calm appears. You stop trying to match the undergrad pace and start honouring your own. You let yourself stay in, light a candle, wrap up in a blanket with your book or your thoughts... whichever shows up first.

Maybe you’ve grown old before your time, becoming the kind of person who calls 11 p.m. “late” and finds deep joy in an uninterrupted morning coffee. And that’s okay. Protecting your peace is its own small rebellion in a world that never stops refreshing.

There’s a certain art to this almost-break. It’s the art of slowing down before permission arrives, of being tired and still grateful, of realizing that rest doesn’t always mean escape. Sometimes it just means breathing, knowing that you’ve made it through the noise once again.

So here’s to the in-between. To the pause before the pause. To the slightly-too-long to-do list and the candle that somehow smells like “calm ambition.” To being the Master’s student looking out onto everything, steady, a little sleepy, quietly proud.

Because the truth is, you don’t have to chase what you’ve already outgrown. You just have to trust what you’re building now, the version of you that knows rest is part of progress and that reflection is a form of momentum.