Much to the annoyance of all my friends from more rural parts of the world, I have always said Cambridge is a village. Once all I meant by this was that I lived two minutes from a cow. Four years in and the city has only become smaller. I could write down many things you must do once in Cambridge, but sadly most things aren’t worth a repeat. Seeing the same faces everywhere I go has started to feel less like an episode of Friends and more like a dull spy movie with too small a casting budget.

So I want out. Way out. The saying might go “If you’re tired of Cambridge, move to London,” but I’ve got bigger plans: I’m off to discover the New World. Plenty of others right now are also in the process of applying to further study, and the USA will be one of the most popular destinations. But why are we all so keen to jump ship as we start the next stage in our academic life? If you spend much time in any MCR in this city you may be surprised by how international they are - the entire world seems to have chosen to up sticks and leave.

Why, as some friends from continental Europe might say, is there such a zeitgeist for wanderlust? When people ask why I’m jetting off I can lay out my reasons. But like a badly trained flea circus, when I try to round them all up, they eventually leave me with the itching feeling that I’ve missed something. I can name people I want to work with, fields I want to explore, places I want to visit, but it starts to sound a bit like I’m standing in a perfectly good lifeboat trying to persuade everyone it’s worth jumping out in the storm to swim to an identical one on the horizon. Maybe I just love applying for visas. Maybe I enjoy being in places where no one can understand my accent. Maybe I want my PhD to drag on for twice as long. But in all honesty the changes are more motivated by my gut than my head.

In German the word ‘Wanderlust’ has fallen out of favour, replaced by the even more apt ‘Fernweh’, literally far-sickness, a play on the old German word ‘Heimweh’, home-sickness. Call me a hypochondriac, but I’m pretty sure I’m afflicted.

Maybe I think I’m going to become the academic equivalent of a Jack Kerouac character, listlessly blowing in and out of physics departments up along the eastern seaboard. Maybe I just yearn to be a big fish in a smaller pond, but am I really the type who would make life decisions based on the opportunity to feel vaguely superior to my peers for a couple of years?

After doing all the soul searching I can manage without dissolving into some kind of existential puddle, I’ve whittled it down to two impulses. And neither of them is going on my personal statement.

The first is the desire for a clean slate. Who among us doesn’t believe that if they got to do the whole ‘social life’ thing again from scratch that they couldn’t do a better job of it now? Was I unbearable as a fresher? Yes. Will I still be unbearable as a new grad? Probably, but it’s a whole different brand of unbearable now.

I can’t be the only person who notices about five years of maturity and social competency drop away whenever I go to a dinner party with my parents. I have lots of close friends and family who I’ll miss terribly but I think it’s inevitable that we’ll always regress when we’re around the people from our past. That can be a great thing; I just think it would be better if it was also a rare one.

The second is a hangover from adolescence. It’s the same reason we love to travel, potentially more than any generation before us, and that’s to prove our autonomy to the world. We've been cooped up in libraries for years, battery farmed for essays and examples sheets, neck-deep in the education process with not much more to show of our lives than an impressive list of hobbies and achievements counted in base-four. Education is for kids, and yet we’re still here. Why wouldn't we take any opportunity to try and prove we’re the masters of our own destiny?

Maybe others have more concrete reasons to be jumping ship, but if I have contracted far-sickness, it’s from these base impulses. The reasons may be shallow, but once you've caught the bug there’s no cure.