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Social life: most econ graduate students study a lot. Social life is
what you make of it. There is a vast city of endless cultural wealth and
also endless tourist traps and super-pricey wastes of money all around
you. Of course there is a pub at each street corner. There are two pubs
at LSE, or perhaps three. The student union pub (the Three Tuns) offers
subsidized drinks. People do go there quite frequently. The Student
Union has various activities; check out their website. But it's not the
primary focus of LSE socializing. The LSE is not a normal "campus". And
graduate economists are not in a normal field. So social life is low-key
and entirely up to you. As I said, you'll be in a city of endless
possibilities.
So the thing to remember is that in England, the pub culture is very
strong. Sadly drunkenness, casual vandalism and the occasional lewd act
(or is this not so sad after all?!) are quite common in public these
days. It can be quite annoying to catch a "Night-bus" (the tube shuts
down at midnight) and be surrounded by loud drunk people, knowing that
you have an exam on which your life depends the following day.
Also: to Americans, beware. People in England, and especially your
continental European classmates, are often more aggressively political
than you will be accustomed to handling. Sometimes they will make
inaccurate and sweeping statements and can be very all-assuming when it
comes to their own supposed superiority. This can be an irritant. Most
English people are not especially political, but when drunk, can be
confrontational. Sometimes however the added intrusion of political and
intellectual concerns into daily life can be a plus for many people, who
warm to it. There is much less political correctness here, and a lot
more intellectual open-ness in many ways. Opinions that would be
censored in mainstream American papers are published here freely, some
of them stupid, others not. As I said, you might find life here a lot of
fun. It's certainly an exciting country. London is the cheap air-flight
capital of the world, so flying to other spots in Europe is pretty easy.
And there is still adequate public transport to take you around Britain
for cheap. In this country, every few miles bring something dramatically
different and it can all be a wonderful thrill.
LSE itself attracts a host of impressive speakers. Lectures are very
well attended, even by undergraduate students. Lectures by big-name
visiting economists are popular choices for economics graduate students.
All in all, LSE is as social or unsocial as you want it to be.
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