A Degree in Surviving
“80p for a bag of fusilli, £1 for the sauce…if I batch cook, that’s dinner for three days,”
I tell myself as I stand in the aisle, overwhelmed, mentally ticking off the cheapest groceries so that I can afford to socialise this week. Trying to stick to a budget of £30 a week for food was becoming increasingly difficult, prices seem to be rising by the day.
I pull out my phone to check the time. Only an hour until I start work – another late-night close, another lecture I’ll be too tired to follow tomorrow. It felt almost like a ritual, rushing through the aisles before a shift, trying to stretch a student loan that never seems to match the cost of actually living.
Moments like this have become the backdrop of my degree. I haven’t exactly been living up to my expectations of being a student: the carefree spontaneity and the sense of endless freedom. Instead, life feels like a careful balancing act where every pound has a purpose and every unexpected cost knocks something else out of place.
I know I am not the only one doing supermarket maths. Everywhere I look, students are being pushed into these same tight corners, with rising rents, high food prices, bills that make you think twice about turning the heating on, or how long you spend in the shower. Research has even shown that maintenance loans haven’t kept up with inflation for years¹, meaning most students are left with a shortfall before they’ve even bought a textbook. Many universities offer ‘hardship funds’ and ‘cost-of-living support’, but the reality is that most of us are working part-time, skipping meals and even using food banks just to get through the term; in fact, there has been a doubled increase in the use of food banks amongst students in recent years².
On campus, it’s the same story. You hear it in the way people talk between lectures, comparing rent like battle scars, or laughing about how they’ve mastered the art of finding the best yellow sticker items in the reduced section. It’s there in the library too, where half the students look like they’ve come straight from a shift, still wearing branded fleeces, or smelling faintly of fryer oil. It may not be explicit, but you can feel the strain in the smallest of things. The friend who quietly stops coming to society events, because £8 for a ticket would feed them for a few days, or the housemate who keeps their coat on indoors to try and save on energy bills. It is so strange how quickly these things become normal, how easily we all slip into a version of student life that revolves less around freedom and more around surviving.
Working part-time was supposed to be a small thing with a few shifts here and there, just to tide me over, but it has slowly taken over my life. Late night closes blur into early lectures, and I find myself sitting in seminars with heavy eyes, trying to focus while my brain feels like it’s still somewhere behind the bar, putting together cocktails or pulling pints. Then, when I am at work, I find my mind thinking of university, panicking about fast-approaching assignments and when I will be able to work on them. Reading journal articles on my lunch break, trying to scramble together some notes so that I can get straight to it when I’m finally home. There is a constant sense of being split in two: the student I’m meant to be and the worker I have to be, just to afford to stay here. Research shows that 20% of students are juggling full-time work³: whether we’re behind a bar, in retail, or care jobs, we are all just trying to keep up with university while our bodies run on caffeine and whatever sleep we can grab.
Sometimes it feels as if the academic side of university is slipping through my fingers, not because I don’t care, but because the cost of living has truly turned studying into something that has to fit around everything else.
Student housing is its own battle. Most student houses I’ve lived in or visited seem to share the same familiar smell of damp, the same black patches creeping up bedroom walls, the same thin windows that never quite shut properly. We learn to ignore the mould at first, wiping it away with cheap spray and pretending it won’t come back. Everyone jokes about it, calling it ‘character’ or ‘part of the student experience,’ but there is nothing funny about a cough lasting six months or finding your clothes permanently musty no matter how many times you wash them. Landlords shrug it off as condensation or some other miscellaneous issue, and leave us to live in a house that would never pass the standards of anyone else. What makes it worse is that we’re paying a lot to live here; every year the rent goes up, and every year we convince ourselves we can stretch just a little further, cut back on the food shop, make it work. Before we know it, we’re yet again locked in, paying hundreds a month for the privilege of living in conditions that would be unacceptable anywhere else.
In quieter moments, I catch myself wondering what version of student life I will remember in the long run. Whether I will look back and think of the lectures and friendships, or just the pure exhaustion, the mould, the late shifts and the constant calculations. However, there is a strange sort of resilience that grows out of this. As students, we learn to share, to support each other, to laugh when we want to cry and to keep going when sometimes it feels impossible. We become resourceful in ways we never expected, finding comfort in small routines and solidarity in the struggles we quietly recognise in one another. It may not be the university experience we had imagined as spritely eighteen-year-olds, but it is one we are living – a degree earned not just through essays and exams, but through surviving the cost of simply being here.
¹Butler, J. (2025). Save the Student. [online] Save the Student. Available at: https://www.savethestudent.org/money/surveys/student-money-survey-2025-results.html [Accessed 28 May. 2026]
²NUS UK. (2024). BREAKING: Student foodbank use has doubled since 2022. [online] Available at: https://www.nus.org.uk/cost-of-living-survey-2024 [Accessed 28 May. 2026]
³NUS UK. (2024). BREAKING: Student foodbank use has doubled since 2022. [online] Available at: https://www.nus.org.uk/cost-of-living-survey-2024 [Accessed 28 May. 2026]
Written by Izabel Richardson
