Written by Amy Mullins-Sanchez
Many of us study degrees to get somewhere. Away from the terrifying outcome of graduating and ending up nowhere.
The common anxiety of post-graduation plans has now become a way to make new friends. I’ve experienced it at freshers’ bars, house-parties, and in my shared kitchen at 4 in the morning with someone who, at the time, I had ominously saved in my phone as Room 203 Guy.
You find that somewhere is different for everyone, though most of these are places where people won’t be burdening, or being burdened by loved ones.
A few months into my second year, I figured out where my somewhere was. Apparently, it was anywhere but here. I had hundreds of mental maps united under one principle: ‘I hate doing this.’
It was hilarious. In my first year I had developed such a genuine love for studying Anthropology that I stopped talking about it. My friends knew I ‘actually liked’ what I did — beyond normal levels of tolerance and mild interest — so I had disqualified myself from giving advice.
Back then, my somewhere was a beautifully infinite destination. Picture an untouched crystal-surfaced lake next to a ring of pine trees and some mountains. Picture that next to an extremely large loan and a bunch of paperwork for ESRC funding. I had plans to do a PhD – I had to. Maybe it was the only thing I had ever wanted. Unemployment? Now it’s a research sabbatical. Uncertainty? I chew it up. I clarify ‘Uncertainty’ in my footnotes: ‘Don’t leave me in a room with Uncertainty because when I get that PhD, it’s gonna get ugly.’
Yet, as a result of overextending myself, inevitably my second year was terrible. I regressed on a lot of my beliefs, ambitions and dreams. I was strung out on information in a way that burrowed deep into my vision. Have you ever gotten sick of sightseeing? Too many beaches on that nice holiday and everything starts looking like a brochure.
I still enjoyed Anthropology, but I dreaded readings and deadlines. Insecurity commanded a tight grip over me: I felt personally victimised by the markers of my essays, even when the essays were good. While the passion of even the most boring aspects of the learning process remained, studying became an overwhelming ordeal. I resorted to focusing on machine output the way that I had seen some very driven acquaintances do: ‘if your work nauseates you, then focus on getting a 2:1 so you can still make it all worthwhile.’
Juggling priorities is always hard. Sometimes we think we can’t remove ourselves from an overwhelming situation. Sometimes we’re half-right: it might really be too late to swap that module out or to rescind two years of fees.
If you find fulfilment in knowledge acquisition this can be an especially disorienting experience. Maybe your friends have always said you’re good at explaining things, or that you have unique ideas. Maybe you’ve decided to study something humanitarian or environmental because you want to be a helper . Maybe you’re the first to get a degree in your family and they’ve always supported you in developing your natural interests and abilities. Maybe you’ve grown up as a classic over-achiever, and you like being called that. ‘Failing’ to learn, ‘failing’ to enjoy learning, feels like betraying that uniquely inquisitive part of yourself that everyone, and especially you, wants to believe in so badly.
As an LSE student, this most likely sounds familiar to you.
But what’s the upside in all this?
In my experience, you can’t fix academic burnout by forcing yourself to enjoy your degree again or by trying to get higher grades.
This is an overthinker’s problem. It has deep roots in your head. Your identity, interests, relationships, your future and day-to-day plans are also bordered by the reality that you are paying LSE between £9000 and £35000 yearly for one apparent purpose: studying.
It helped me to change up my system. Studying may be necessary for you now because of your degree. However, self-study is something you choose to do willingly, and you can do and organise it in whatever way you want.
I don’t mean committing yourself to becoming a master of intelligent-sounding things. You don’t need to read Aristotle if you don’t want to. Instead, you can learn all about the chemistry involved in creating perfume base notes, the personal biographies of your favourite game devs, how to speak an almost-extinct language, or even how to do calculus properly (because you secretly found it relaxing during A-level maths revision).
Yes, you can learn about the most conventionally boring, least professionally transferable topic just because. Your passion for learning about it is a strong enough reason. Humans are hardwired to seek out new information for our survival. A nice side effect of that is we can be curious (and generate excitement for) almost anything.
I’ve been studying Japanese since April, and I am now someone who wakes up excited to look at the same bland colours of my Anki dashboard and revise yesterday’s flashcards. It is deeply unsexy and it makes me very happy. I’m learning to draw by copying manga panels (despite knowing nothing about manga) because Pewdiepie did it and it worked for him. I’d like to try watercolours too.
The mental environment I am advocating for will probably bleed into your academics, although that isn’t the purpose of self-study. It’s more about downtime. Self-study, not university work, replaced doomscrolling for me. I don’t want to spend all my time doing further readings just to feel that vanquishing one self-destructive hobby suddenly makes me everything good about Patrick Bateman because I Lock In.
I put work, hobbies and self-study in different categories. You can enjoy all of them: self-study is different because it creates moments of joy that also make you feel like you are going somewhere, even if that place is not really a place at all but a feeling, and even if that feeling has nothing to do with the milestones in your life like getting a job and moving out. That sense of being in control, developing focus, increasing your cognitive pathways is a productivity-guru sell. Since you’re still reading, I’m selling this:
Hopelessness is a well-placed reaction when presented with everything that’s going wrong everywhere. But learning something with real interest, any kind of mental input that makes you feel a little unstuck, excited, uncertain or scared can shift the immovable slope hurtling you towards nowhere, even if at the end of the day you haven’t accrued more resources to end climate change. Fixing problems isn’t the point of self-study. It’s about developing a curious ecosystem of a mind that gives you more freedom to expand what matters and what you believe about yourself.
Some kind of growth every day makes the pattern familiar to you. If everything else feels like drowning sometimes, you can have comfort in the thing you have developed to be uniquely yours. And if that thing is maths, or British pop culture, or analog photography, or PC builds, then I think you should have a real look into it.
