Written by Anna Alexiev
As the first month of the Autumn Term comes to a close, the celebratory buzz of Freshers’ Week is giving way to a much harsher reality. When talking to fellow first-years, one topic keeps resurfacing, usually paired with the same mix of panic and anxiety: Spring Weeks.
For those who may be unfamiliar, Spring Weeks are short, highly competitive internship programmes offered by investment banks and consulting firms to first-year students. They are marketed as early ‘insight’ opportunities. But, in practice, Spring Weeks serve as the unofficial gateway to securing future summer internships and eventual graduate roles – they are the first step in a tightly-compressed career pipeline that begins almost as soon as university does.
Despite hardly being a month into this university, a period meant to celebrate the huge achievement of getting here, many students are already frantically chasing the next milestone. It may arguably be an expectation to be surrounded by ambition at LSE. The situation is perhaps best summarised by one student who confessed, “It’s a numbers game. I think I applied to over 100 Spring Weeks last year.”
In accordance with the “E” in “LSE”, it’s only logical to view this problem through the lens of an economist. Currently, we are dealing with a classic supply and demand problem, except here, the gap between the two is getting wider with each passing year. The demand for prestigious Spring Weeks is skyrocketing, while the supply of spots remains fixed.
Let’s consider the odds. In 2020, Goldman Sachs reported receiving 17,000 applications for only 450 Spring Week places, translating to a brutal 2.6% acceptance rate. At Morgan Stanley, the reported acceptance rate for their 2020 program was similarly cutthroat, at 4%. To put this into context, you are statistically much more likely to secure a place at LSE itself, which has an acceptance rate of approximately 6.33% (1 in 16 applicants get in).
Excess demand doesn’t just clear the market, but instead actively generates behavior that creates more excess demand in the following cycle. The market never stabilizes because the anxiety over limited supply drives more aggressive application habits, ultimately worsening the perceived scarcity.
The intense pressure of the environment is perhaps best captured by a first-year student, only a week into the Autumn Term, who admitted: “Honestly, finance isn’t my goal, but seeing everyone around me apply makes me wonder if I’m supposed to be doing it too?”
This feeling of being compelled to chase the next achievement, even an unwanted one, is not accidental. It is simply how the system is designed. We exist in a society built upon a perpetual, often anxious, state of longing, whether that be for professional success, for money, or for validation. We may feel desperate to prove our worth and our right to a “seat at the table,” to the point where this relentless competition begins to feel like a twisted form of natural selection. Those who opt out or slow down are often quickly (and unfairly) labelled as “lazy” or insufficient. Most of us accept this as the inherent, natural order of things: a warped, modern revision of Darwinian theory.
But we must remember the crucial distinction: we are real people, not merely statistical entities, nor perfectly rational agents designed for optimisation. We can’t be ranked in the way that these systems expect us to be. We exist outside of the clean, predictable models of economic theory, navigating a self-perpetuating system that treats our time, effort, and mental health as inputs in a zero-sum numbers game. Arguably, it is the system that is flawed, not the individual caught within its relentless cycle.
The core dilemma this creates is a growing difficulty in separating who we are from what we achieve. How many of us can truly distinguish our identity from our performance? As one of my friends put it, “If I’m not doing something impressive, I feel like I disappear. My personality is basically just my LinkedIn headline at this point.” Wellness advice and mental-health support have genuinely helped many students, and practices like mindfulness can often offer real comfort. But when the pressure is structural, being told to “take a deep breath” can feel a bit like being handed a yoga mat in a burning building. It’s appreciated, but doesn’t exactly address the fire. Coping strategies can soften the symptoms, but the environment, as well as the expectations powering it, remain very much intact.
The fundamental question is maybe not how to cope, but why we are coping with this in the first place. Any meaningful solution begins with challenging the existing framework, rather than merely adapting to it. After countless campus conversations with friends, classmates, and even the occasional elevator confidant, the consensus seems to be: ”We keep learning how to survive the system, but no one stops to ask why the system needs surviving.” The way forward could involve a hard look at our collective priorities and questioning which goals we have implicitly chosen to privilege over our well-being.
If the entire identity and success of the LSE are built upon this constant state of overachievement, what would happen if students actually paused? What if, even briefly, we chose not to feed the anxious cycle of “constant wanting”? Several students I spoke to admitted that the idea sounds great in theory and terrifying in practice. One laughed and said, “I’d love to take a break, but I’m worried everyone else will sprint past while I’m catching my breath”. Another was blunter: “It’s not ambition, but survival.”
And that’s the paradox. Everyone recognises the problem, but nobody wants to be the first to stop moving. Rejecting the system feels too risky: risky to careers, risky to identity, and risky to the carefully curated narrative of success that brought many of us here. The relentless motion, the perpetual striving, is what keeps the gears turning. A collective pause would expose just how dependent this celebrated structure is on student anxiety, on our willingness to measure ourselves against impossible standards. Without that momentum, the illusion of scarcity and prestige might not shatter entirely, but it might look smaller, quieter, and a lot less impressive than we were taught to believe.
Right now, our collective priorities, set by those all-important rankings and the relentless buzz of prestige, give the university every reason to keep the pressure cooker on high. The true path forward isn’t in better coping skills, but in challenging those metrics. We must decide, collectively, that a system producing this level of exhaustion and self-doubt is not a mark of excellence but a sign of failure.
True progress would mean demanding that universities, ranking bodies, and employers value curiosity, individuality, and well-being just as much as corporate logos on graduate destinations.
As a friend at UCL observed (proof this mindset isn’t exclusive to Houghton Street): “If intellectual curiosity doesn’t count unless it fits on a CV, we should call it branding, not education.” Until the system stops treating students like perfectly optimised financial products, we will continue to sprint toward burnout, mistaking exhaustion for ambition and motion for meaning.
