Competition & Workload

For a lot of people at Cambridge, this would be the first thing that springs to mind. Many of the students come from their schools as the best/top percentile, and suddenly half of them are below average. That can be a major shock to the system, and often comes despite the student working longer and harder than they’ve ever had to before. This is often argued to contribute to or exacerbate issues with mental health, e.g. see this article.

This is compounded by the incredible range of activities on offer. With so many societies to join, trying to find time to participate often leads to people taking on too much and they struggle to keep on top of anything.

Ability to react

This is a more fundamental problem for the university than for individual students, but inherent in a huge organisation which has thrived on very slowly evolving principles for hundreds of years is a slow reaction rate. This is seen across a huge range of ideas, but for one, see the Maths lecturers’ insistence on using chalkboards. For some lecturers, this suits perfectly; they write small amounts of text, like big drawings, and spend most of the lecture talking. But others spend the whole time rushing from one board to another write sentence after sentence, without the time to impart much comment or understanding. One of the best lecturers I had, Julia Gog, mentioned how difficult she’d found it to persuade other lecturers that her style, using a projector, was working well and made the course so much better organised (e.g notes could be uploaded online afterwards easily).

Lack of diversity

I’m not a great person to talk about this, having come from a typical rural school in the North East which had a single black student and to the best of my knowledge not a single pupil practising a religion other than Christianity, but I am reliably informed by every student from a large city in the UK that Cambridge is hugely lacking in racial/religious diversity. Certainly, the range of backgrounds of students at many other universities vastly outweighs the London Grammar school-centric population Cambridge seemed to have. Personally, I suspect, despite the work Cambridge is doing to try and improve, this mostly reflects the economic demographics and as such will be slow to change. For anyone concerned about this, there is plenty of support available, and the student union CUSU is usually reasonably representative.

Lack of independence

I think this is a fairly overlooked problem at Cambridge, though I imagine that’s largely because the student population eventually deals with learning generic life skills after they come out the other side. With ‘bedders’ who clean your room and empty your bins, accommodation and food provided by the college, maintenance provided by an in house team, and supervisors watching your work carefully all throughout your undergrad at least, life skills/experiences like cleaning, cooking or dealing with landlords and messy contracts are often put off until you enter the ‘real world’. I found that being provided limited cooking facilities because it was assumed you would eat in ‘hall’ (the canteen) every evening was quite frustrating when I could see other friends around the country learning how to actually cook!

Nightlife

A very student problem, but Cambridge being a fairly small town, the clubs & nightlife is fairly small in range. There are places to go out, but you don’t have much diversity, and the focus for university students at least tends to be on easy, cheesy pop music. If you think a night out should be acting silly in a club with some friends you’re fine, but if you want the latest in X genre, you’d best start making trips to London

Student Politics

Ok, so this one is definitely personal, but for me the University level student politics wasn’t in great shape. For perspective, it’s important to note that because of the collegiate system, college politics is often the foremost of students attention, and those student bodies are often successful at enacting change. On the other hand, this left little attention to how CUSU (Cambridge University Student Union) runs, and this suffered repeatedly from low approval ratings and low participation. CUSU is a strong proponent of support for marginalised groups, and does a good job at this as far as I can see, but struggles to affect most students everyday lives as much as would be hoped. In addition, the self selecting nature of their politics means that the bodies views often disagree strongly with the students they represent.

Example: Class lists
Class lists are a system whereby every students results are displayed publicly on the wall of Senate House, and later online. Many students feel that this level of public scrutiny is unnecessary and harsh to some, and pushed for an opt out process whereby students could choose easily whether they wanted their name to be displayed or not (currently this requires doctors approval). CUSU instead voted unanimously to have the class lists scrapped entirely. After protests, a student referendum was held and the conclusion was a reasonable win for the opt-out/keep them side, over scrapping.

Cambridge has lots of problems, but I had an incredible time and would highly recommend it to most prospective students. Hopefully by the point of applying you should have a good idea whether the Cambridge atmosphere will suit you; it is not for everyone, and many people who thrive elsewhere know Cambridge would not have worked as well. There are a lot of great people but others with huge egos who are not as clever as they think they are. I went there to do computer science taking a year out from training to be a cardiologist and had just completed a doctorate. My cardiology boss in a red brick university and teaching hospital was doing more research and publishing more in a full time clinical post than many of the cambridge academics. It’s a wonderful experience to go there and one feels a bit spoilt but I don’t regard an oxbridge degree as the greatest thing ever. I have had some very mediocre ex oxbridge junior doctors. I am not sure that the tutoring system encourages a self directed desire for life long learning or an ability to communicate or empathise or even grow up. For many it is simply a continuation of the public school system.

If I could go back in time I would rather study at any other university

Cambridge is a wonderful place. Quite simply there is nothing else like it. The quality of teaching is amazing. As a city, Cambridge is very peaceful. The architecture is beautiful, and the people are lovely.