Hey everyone! It's Pavla, one of your LSE student content creators, but for this vlog you will not just be hearing from me.
We have just come to the end of the first term of the 2021-2022 school year
and I thought it'd be interesting to hear from my fellow grad students how they found their first term here at LSE.
Hi, I'm Maria Bermudez and I'm studying my Master's in Health Policy, Planning and Financing.
Hi, my name is Ines and I'm doing a Master's in Public Policy and Administration.
Hi, I'm Nina. I'm doing the Master's in Law.
Hi, my name is Stuart and I do International Social and Public Policy.
So my expectation is that this will be a whole lot of reading.
A bunch of reading, a bunch of reporting, and a lot of serious work.
This has been my dream uni for so long, so there's a lot of expectations about how this is gonna be.
This was gonna be the first time for me to live abroad. So I was nervous,
but still very, very excited because I really wanted to study here.
I honestly sort of felt that I already knew what's gonna happen.
I really thought it'd be like regular university and it'll be the same old, same old.
I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I mean, it's an internationally acclaimed school
but I was really looking for kind of an academically rigorous program
and meeting really interesting and vibrant people.
I would say that it did match up, but it was also more than my expectations.
There are a lot of readings. There are a lot of things to do,
but there are also a lot of extracurriculars to balance out the weight of the academics.
Definitely it was overwhelming for a few weeks,
but I was glad I had a very great mentor, like academic mentor, and she told me like,
"Don't panic. It's normal. A lot of people is just facing the same just stress and doubts as you do."
Certainly, it matches my expectations in some way, but I think it also like went beyond it.
Well, you know everybody says master's is hard and I thought that,
oh you know, I have already done so many hard things in life.
How hard could it be? But when I'm actually in the master's, I realized it's quite hard.
The academic rigor's definitely been there but it hasn't been isolating.
It hasn't been like first year back in undergrad where it was really just struggling to keep my head above the water.
And I've really felt supported and that's both by my profs and by my peers.
My favorite part of this term would be signing up for extracurriculars actually,
which I find very interesting because I get to meet a lot of new people.
LSE is very well known for being like very welcoming with people from abroad and definitely it is a thing.
But I'm really happy with the kind of people I met at LSE and the whole diversity of the cohort.
People work and come. People come right after you know university.
So I like that part.
Social policy had a winter get-together and it was really great to see all these different people in my seminar
who I'd seen like in an academic context.
But most of them I hadn't hung out with one-on-one or just like out socializing.
And to just like have fun and chat with them and our professors was so great.
And just being able to see each other's daily lives and grow so much closer with these people
you'd spend the past few months with was really, really terrific.
Well, I did mention about work-life balance, so I guess that is the most challenging part.
It's on you being the student to actually have time or make time within the 24 hours in your day
to actually accomplish it all.
First of all moving here and also like just to establish in a new place and like properly settle it takes time.
Yeah, but probably just the few first weeks are like the most difficult.
But challenging per se in LSE would just be the studying.
Keeping up with the studying, wanting to do good because people have very high expectations of you
and everyone in your class is smart.
I would say the most challenging thing was probably kind of keeping that motivation going to keep up with readings, to keep up with assignments.
Because it does get a little bit overwhelming. It's kind of trying to urge yourself on.
It's surprising for me that there are a lot of things or activities around.
Which is surprising for me because I always pictured a master's programme to be very serious work,
so it surprised me that people actually have lives here.
I think the thing that surprised me the most was all the socials that we have at LSE.
I like them. I like the fact that they really pay a lot of attention to the fact that students need to socialize also.
It's not just studies, studies, studies. I came in to LSE thinking it would be a pretty conventional program especially for social policy.
And I was just blown away by how like, I hate to use the phrase "cutting edge",
but kind of just at the forefront of academic thought
a lot of these professors were and how engaged they were with the actual real world realities of social policy.
I guess my advice would be to actually seek out these opportunities and to seek out the adventure that you want to embark
in this one-year or two-year programme or what have you.
Just go for whatever it is that you're looking for and it's very easy to approach everyone in LSE.
Take a look on previous LSE videos actually.
It was very useful to see like what kind of clothing to pack for the weather here,
all the international requirements now especially with the COVID situation.
If you can get in touch with people from your cohort ahead of time, I think that's also very helpful.
I decided to create a WhatsApp group I think back in May.
We also have had like Zoom calls.
So it was very interesting because you start like building friendships in some way before and that makes it
easy when you come here and realize that you already know a bit of your cohort.
You're smart. You've got this. That's how you got in and you're going to make it through, you know,
effortlessly because you already have all that it takes to get through the master's, so you will.
Like don't doubt yourself at all.
One thing I think you should really know coming to LSE is that, as great a city as London is,
it's really big and it can be a little isolating to come in here. But the people I met at LSE, when I
really committed to grabbing a pint with them or going on walks with them,
became kind of a home base for me.
And I think that was what really just pushed my experience at LSE to the next level.
Bye.
Thanks for watching. Bye.
Oh, thank you for watching.
Alright, I'll see you guys soon around LSE.