Thanks Lara, I really appreciate your advice :) I do have a tendency to be hard on myself when it comes to studying, but I guess it is legitimately difficult to study and have a full-time job too. I'm really looking forward to when I can leave my job and just spend all day long on my masters, and no longer have as many conflicting priorities :)

Thanks guys :) I'm feeling a bit better about it now... starting to look forward to it a bit more instead of panicking! I'm really relieved to hear that other people have problems with procrastination, I thought it was just me.

I took two years out after my undergrad to save up money for my Masters and I planned to read my entire Masters indicative reading list in that time... now there's only a few months to go and I've realised I've spent about 15% of that two years reading and preparing, and the rest thinking up ingenous ways of avoiding doing any work

I think it's so hard because I really want to do well at Uni, so it feels like a lot of pressure whenever I sit down to work. I wish I knew how to chill out a bit more about it and enjoy the work without worrying too much about the results

Hi everyone

I'm starting a Masters in English Lit at Warwick this autumn, but am worried that I'm not up to the job. The main worry on my mind is that I did an English Lit/Creative Writing degree, for which I wrote a creative writing dissertation rather than a critical essay dissertation.

The standard essay length at Warwick is 8000, which would be fine if I had written a critical dissertation because I would have got the experience of writing an 8000 word piece from that. As it is, the longest essay I've written is just over 3,500 words. I'm worried that I'm going to get there and be at a disadvantage to everyone else who did a real dissertation. I don't even know if I can *write* 8000 words, let alone the 16,000 needed for the Masters dissertation.

I'm afraid I don't have sufficient experience to succeed at doing my Masters. Is anyone else doing a Masters who started in a similar position to me who can offer some advice?

Many thanks x