The deflation happens before you've even finished reading. Someone you vaguely know posts a LinkedIn update with a new graduate role, an impressive company, a caption about gratitude, and something in you quietly deflates. You weren't even thinking about your own applications until thirty seconds ago.
I'm Lily, a postgraduate student studying Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory. This summer I'm writing a dissertation, sending what feels like a relentless stream of job applications, and trying not to measure my progress against a feed that only ever shows the finished version of other people's lives. It's harder than it sounds. And I've started to think that the difficulty itself is worth discussing.
Why summer turns up the volume
The academic calendar winds down just as everyone's professional one seems to take off. Internship announcements, job offers, dissertation completions, travel plans: all of it lands at once, while you're still in the middle of your own unfinished business. For postgraduate students, the pressure cuts both ways. There's the academic side, where it can feel like everyone else's research is further along, and the professional one, where it can feel like your entire cohort has already figured out what comes next. Neither impression is accurate. But knowing that doesn't make the feeling go away.
"I'd open LinkedIn to look for jobs and end up just feeling terrible about myself," says Ben, a King's postgraduate student. "I had to start being more honest with friends about how I was actually feeling. Most of them were in the same place."
The advice that doesn't quite work
The standard response to comparison is to stop doing it: remind yourself that social media isn't real life, count your blessings, and focus on your own journey. This is all true. It is also, in my experience, almost completely useless in the moment. Telling yourself that someone else's highlight reel is curated doesn't make the sting of it land any differently.
What's helped me more is getting specific about what I'm actually measuring myself against. Usually, when I dig into it, I'm not comparing my real situation to someone else's real situation. I'm comparing my internal experience (the anxiety, the uncertainty, the sense of not being quite there yet) to their external presentation. That's not a fair contest. Nobody posts the afternoon they spent refreshing their inbox.
Small shifts that actually help
Keeping a running note of what you're working on, not achievements but just activity, gives you something concrete to return to when the feed starts to feel like evidence of your own inadequacy. It doesn't have to be significant. "Wrote 300 words. Read two chapters. Made a decision about something." Just enough to remind yourself that things are happening, even when they're not postable.
Talking honestly with people in the same position helps more than almost anything else. Not the curated version: the actual, uncertain, mid-process version. It almost always turns out that the people who look most sorted are managing the same doubts.
Someone else's good news is not evidence that you're behind. Their timeline was never yours to be on.
If comparison is feeding something bigger (persistent anxiety, low mood, a sense of being stuck), you can find guidance on Student Services Online and your Faculty Wellbeing Advisor can give personalised support. YoungMinds also has honest, practical resources worth reading.