I recently graduated with a strong 2:1 (66%) from Durham. I want to be a barrister and want to pursue an LLM and need financial aid e.g. a scholarship to do so. The problem is, these opportunities seem to be exclusively given out to students with first class law degrees and prizes. In all honesty, I struggled during my undergraduate degree. I'm an international student, and because of covid, I had to do my second year of university online. I had classes at night due to the time difference, caught covid and was stuck exclusively at home for 15 months due to the severe restrictions in my home country. Afterwards, I was diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression. I went from placing within 7.2% of my cohort in first year to placing within 70% of my cohort in second year. When I returned for my third year from my year abroad, which I passed, most of my friends had already graduated and it was a struggle to make new friends because everyone had their own friendship groups. As a result, I felt extremely lonely and even tried to kill myself. I'm planning on working part-time and taking a year out while I try to find a job as a paralegal. I don't have it in me to work from 9-5 five days a week and to do a Masters this year. But I can't help but feel that most of my classmates are getting further ahead of me in life whereas I'm just consistently going downhill: I'm tired, have no future plans, gained 30 pounds, whereas my classmates are getting engaged, have training contracts and pupillage offers. What next steps do you suggest I take?