Congratulations! You made it to UCL! Now it’s time to be assigned your first year accommodation.
Will it be the luxurious Astor College, or the slightly outdated John Dodgson House? You check your emails daily, waiting for the slow and lethargic UCL admin team to get back to you.
When the email finally arrives (a month late, like most assessment feedback), you find out you’ve been assigned One Pool Street. Clean, modern, spacious, or perhaps just photographed through a lens last seen documenting the curvature of the Earth.
It’s move-in day and your family can barely fit in your room.
The security is comparable to a Heathrow border checkpoint and berates you for not immediately showing your lanyard as soon as you walk in (which you haven't picked up yet). With lifts that encourage stair based fitness, and rooms inspired by Scandinavian minimalism and budgetary efficiency, how could you not be satisfied?
Somehow the illustrious, bustling UCL East campus isn't where you have any of your lectures, and you’re now forced to spend ridiculous sums of money appeasing the London deity, TfL.
Too bad if you're an extrovert, because if you want to bring more than one non-resident in, the security will kindly inform you that socialising with unregistered guests is more heavily restricted than applying for a Schengen visa.
The heating and hot water boomerangs between scalding hot and positively glacial, and good luck picking something up from the accommodation office, as they regularly close early with less than an hour’s notice (helpful considering it takes at least 40 minutes to get back from Bloomsbury).
With their furiously confrontational emails about door decorations — or god forbid, a plug without a fuse — it’s a surprise no comparison has been made to famous authoritarian figures, like Margaret Thatcher or Michael Spence.
Fear not: there's still a chance you’ll get a room with a view, either of the amazing London skyline or the gargantuan block of concrete that is the multi-million pound Marshgate building.
And thank the heavens for the UCL East shuttle bus, yet another impressive investment from the powers that be in the finance department, ferrying students less than a kilometre to Stratford station, demonstrating the spectacular ability of UCL to know exactly where students want their precious tuition fees to be invested.
As the seven-seater of fiscal responsibility whisks you away, saving you a six-minute walk, you feel lucky to be attending an institution that is so committed to spending money wisely, holding themselves to the highest moral standards, and relocating first years as far away from Bloomsbury as possible.