Julie McLaughlin juggles her time between student life at Caledonian University and attempts to teach her dog to dance.

The Christmas lights are radiating the streets with their glow and the devoted Christmas shoppers are strapping on their “bags for life” to get ready for black Friday on November 27.

Meanwhile, the student sits in the library waiting for the day that life-encompassing deadlines are over.

Deadlines are a lot like buses, you wait around for ages wondering if they will ever come and then all of a sudden four come at once.

Studying is a different thing altogether. It gives you time to reflect on what you have learned that year. Maybe a diagram will help me remember? Re-writing notes? But then, as I flick through my screeds of writing page by page I begin to consider possibilities that maybe it wasn’t me who wrote them at all.

I don’t quite remember the lecture on Foucault; in fact I don’t remember anything at all. Perhaps a foreign life form took over me when I was writing these things down in the lecture? Of course it seems unlikely.

No, it becomes all the more apparent that I have in fact failed to listen, perhaps all year.

One week. One week to learn a full course and compile it in to one essay, the odds I fear seem to be weighed against me on this one.

Now there is a thin line between disillusionment and hope.

Disillusionment would be that I could in fact learn everything I needed to know in one week. Hope on the other hand is being selective in what to include in the essay and crossing my fingers that the select few subjects to which I will devote my time contain the gist of the course

As I sit down, books open and begin reading about what discourse and ideology actually are; I find any reason to not stay seated. Making myself tea, walking the dog, maybe a quick nap? Then of course I still have to go to classes.

Here I live in hope that the lecturer will show a compassionate display of Christmas spirit and take pity on the souls like me, by slipping hints or maybe just a solid answer about what is required. This is a clear example of disillusionment.

However the uplifting note to make is that once deadlines and exams are out of the way, there will be cause to celebrate the most wonderful time of the year again.