With dissertation season well and truly over, it feels only right to take a well deserved break from the all consuming shackles of referencing, to focus on the brave students’ stressful battle with the unspeakable – the library. Whether the “library” word alone sends shivers down your spine or puts a spring in your step, I’ll bet my entire degree that you’ve come across some interesting characters during your late night stints in the Sydney Jones.
Those final three weeks of the semester were rougher than any of us expected. The caffeine induced haze really tipped us all over the edge, and regardless of your dissertation results, you’ll always look back on your library time with a mix of fear, regret and a tiny bit of nostalgia. Here’s my rundown of every student you encountered at least once during diss season, whether you liked it or not.
The last minute crammers
Starting off strong with the late night stress heads, who are often spotted surrounded by a circle of energy drinks, three different meal deal combos, and a look of sheer terror on their face. We’ve all been there – hood up, head down, and headphones on, frantically doom scrolling on Google Scholar with nothing but hope and the caffeine shakes by your side.
The last minute crammers, otherwise known as the vampires, will never be spotted in the library until the sun has set because “carpe diem” and “I’ll just do an all nighter the day before” go hand in hand when there’s a mention of quite literally anything other than opening their laptop on the horizon.
Let’s be honest though, if you haven’t found yourself submitting an assignment with three minutes to spare before, or locking yourself in a cubicle outside an exam hall with a pile of notes and a prayer, you’re either a commendable level of organised or not doing the whole student thing right. Shamelessly, after all, if you leave it until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.
The early birds that catch the worms – and a seat
On the other end of the spectrum, you have the ride or die matcha girlies who have somehow already done a half marathon, meal prepped, and climbed Mount Everest all before 8am. You just picture them all arriving at the crack of dawn in hopes of finding a seat; that has to be near a plug with a pretty view to be distracted by.
Poised, posed and pristine, despite their internal crash out, the early birds and their two litre motivational water bottles are found months before deadline season, never without an iced coffee in hand and a tupperware of some delicious rice bowl concoction in their bag, that a meal deal could only dream of being. They’re the backbone of the library hierarchy, and their dedication to completing everything two weeks in advance to “leave time to proofread” is honestly pretty commendable.
From a self proclaimed Type B, we pose a question to the Type A students – what milk were you drinking as a child? Just asking for a friend.
The “here for a good time, not a long time” studiers
These students can only be spotted in the library perched on the end of a table, begging and pleading quite literally anyone who will listen to go for “just one” pint as a “well deserved break” from all the procrastination they’ve been doing. It is a library canon event that you’ll fall victim to, because when they’re around, you somehow always finding yourself in a pub garden with a night out impending and not a word written on a page.
Whether it’s BuzzFeed quizzes, the NYT games, sweet treat runs, fresh air breaks, or a glimpse of sun, these bad influences find any excuse to roam the library, collecting all their easily swayed friends to do quite literally anything other than their three pieces of overdue coursework.
You hate them, but you secretly love them, and you’re always wondering how they have even made it past first semester. One thing is for sure is that they should probably pressure a career in sales and marketing. If the shoe fits, after all.
The “campus is my catwalk” types
Deadline season has hereby been renamed to Liverpool Fashion Week – hosted nowhere else other than the smoking area and social study rooms of the Sydney Jones. These students could have their dissertation, four exams and a presentation due next week, but they will always spend that extra hour at home perfecting the length of their jorts, or rifling through an unexplainably large pile of shoes to match the trim on their bag. They’re almost always found with a cigarette in hand, strutting down the Grove Wing corridor as their own personal runway. Quite honestly, we’re here for it.
You’re either a pyjamas and trackies kind of guy, or you can only feel productive dressed to the nines, but it’s safe to say that Liverpool students sure do know how to turn out a look. Oh, and I heard somewhere through the grapevine that Anna Wintour is planning her next runway outside the front of the Sydney Jones, by the way.
The extremely over caffeinated, overpopulated table of “group project” warriors
The social study of the library is well renowned for being a playroom, therapists office and simply just, not for the weak. Anyone going to social study to “lock in” is either delusional, lying to you, or is in a group of ten people crammed onto a table discussing whose attendance is worse.
On average, this table of students consists of: One person catching up on Love Island, a trio critiquing their likes on Hinge, two politics students utterly and extremely confused about their shared assignment, one person asleep, two people seeing how many grapes they can catch in their mouth at once, and one begging them all to go home.
Regardless of whether you may fall on or off this metaphorical table, there is never a dull day when they rock up. In the end you’re either hit with a flying grape, or forced into a spiral of self-doubt about your attendance and your Hinge prompts. A bit of a win-win situation, right?
To all the incoming final years, please don’t scare yourselves. Dissertation season is like a social experiment, with so many opportunities to observe how consuming more than three Red Bulls a day affects the human brain, or to test how long you can procrastinate a 10,000 essay for, even though you’ve been aware of it since first year.
I can do nothing but conGRADulate (see what we did there) all of us students for surviving the delights and terrors that the library threw our way this year. The Sydney Jones might have been a terrifying building of books, but it’s our terrifying building of books. We loved it really.
