I'll always look back fondly on my time at Cambridge. It's a vibrant place to be when it's alive, that is, every day except for the summer holidays, and the city captured my attention to a far greater extent as a student than it ever did as a tourist looking from the outside.
My first and only visit to Cambridge before was at age seventeen or eighteen, when I absolutely did not see myself going there in the future. I never aspired for it because it just seemed like one of those faraway thoughts everybody has out of obligation to a hyped-up Thing. Sure, I'll go to Oxbridge, whatever, and I'll cure cancer, and I'll solve the climate crisis. I was a cynical person. When we visited Cambridge and Princeton, my dad kept saying "You have to aspire to go here" and "We're showing you these places so you can aspire," but it never went to my head. When it was time to apply to university after doing my A/Ls, I was not well-informed about the process, so I only found out then that the application deadlines of Oxford and Cambridge were for some reason way ahead of the deadlines of every other university in the UK, and I had missed them. It didn't bother me at all. Chances were abysmal in the first place, I figured. I got into both my choice universities anyway. Sheffield was at the time the best in the UK for my field, so it was always the right choice.
Cambridge did not come up on my radar again until my last year at Sheffield, after I'd got my final exam grades but while my dissertation was ongoing. I was applying for both jobs and Master's programs, intending to take whichever came first. My sights were originally set on a Master's at Imperial. Then I came across a Nuclear Energy Master's at Cambridge, and because I had loved every minute of the module about it, I applied to that one, too. The acceptance from Imperial came first and I was thrilled. I thought, well, that's easy, I know what I'm going to do next year now. The Cambridge application was still a long shot in my head so I continued about my existence waiting for the rejection so I could formally accept with Imperial. I remember coming out of my supervisor's office following a very thorough discussion of a dozen different things I needed to do in the lab next time when I got the invitation to interview for Cambridge. I stopped on the side of the stairs in the Materials Department, five floors up, and looked at it with a sense of calm because I felt that nothing was riding on it; if I fumbled the interview, it didn't matter, because I already had another top university in the bag. And a few days later I did the interview in my room after telling my flatmate and friend about it, with all the lights on and the background looking respectable, and absolutely fumbled it. The person who was supposed to ask personality questions was unable to make it so the entire duration of my interview comprised of technical questions. Nathan, who would become one of my professors, was relentless, and the questions were all hard physics. I don't think I confidently knew anything. I made things up, guessed, and confidently explained my ridiculous reasonings. I must have done a good enough job of that to get Nathan's stamp of approval.
That's how I ended up at Cambridge. It sort of just Happened. I did doubt my suitability to this place several times when the work got too hard, but I learned through due process that the work itself was just hard. Anyway. All the time. That's what happens when you force-feed all this expertise from a new field into your brain over an intense, short period of time, where you aren't allowed a learning curve or to start from scratch but chucked straight into the deep end with a rudimentary understanding of How Not to Drown. I'm making it sound horrendous, but I truly did have fun with the challenge of it all. An anecdote I like to tell people is that I genuinely did not know what Claude was until the middle of the second semester and thought ChatGPT and Gemini were shite, so I did the bulk of my coursework with no help from AI whatsoever. Someone from the business school told me about Claude, from which I found out that unlike the other two, it actually knew the correct answer to every assignment. But I had never used it. Amazing. Could've squeezed more marks and a higher average that way, but one thing I'm always going to have now is the assurance that I managed to do the most difficult problems with my own brain and sometimes an extra large can of White Monster.
Beyond studying and crunching for deadlines– and we had a deadline or several every other week– I had the best time at my College. That's a fun thing about Oxbridge. The College system does not work like a Sorting Hat, but I've found "Like Harry Potter Houses" is the easiest way to explain it to someone who's never heard of it. You get an easy opportunity to make friends outside of your field through your College, and mine, being one of the two womens-only Colleges, had a strong air of community. It also helped that Master's students got to attend Formal Halls for free. I only owned two outfits that were suitable and wore them interchangeably, but accessorised differently enough that I don’t look like I own just two outfits in the photos taken every week. Studying at the College library with friends was a good time, because we were all going Through It, and it's better to be stressed out with company than alone. We'd ditch our books and take a stroll in the garden and waste time in the common room when needed. Murray Edwards is also an art gallery with regular new items, so wandering about pretending to have sophistcated takes on the artwork was a common activity as well. Our common room for Master's students has an informal art wall in the form of a large french window that everyone doodles and writes messages on with acrylic and chalk markers, but there was also a real exhibition to which I contributed two pieces. Those pieces are still on the wall because I never bothered taking them home after the exhibition period ended. I wonder if they'll continue to stay up forever, like the other permanent pieces on the College walls.
The fifteen-minute walk from my College to the city centre was my favourite stretch and I never took the bus, preferring to indulge in the little joys of a walkable city. The bus was also never on time, so even when it rained, I walked the half-hour to the Engineering Department. I took the bus just three times over the whole course of the academic year, two of which were the return trip to the Christmas market and carnival in Parker's Piece, and only because it was an exceptionally cold night. I've seen Cambridge in every season and every colour, now, so it has felt like a really long time even though it's only been a year.
I feel like this post has devolved into something that wouldn't be out of place on LinkedIn. It's the most personal I've ever been on this blog, I think, but I'm going to allow it, because you don't graduate from Cambridge every day. I've enjoyed my time at this university and in this city. I'll miss the whole of it when I leave.
