Before the start of Michaelmas, I invited new, incoming students to write about their fears and expectations of life at Cambridge. When the end of term was nigh, I gave those same students the opportunity to write a companion piece about their experiences thus far. These are the results.

Eleanor Mitchell

BEFORE: I have spent most of this past year utterly in love with my own dreamlike vision of Cambridge. A hopeless idealist, I’ve always been a little on the fanciful side and this vision – consisting of gowned dinners spent discussing Shakespeare, weekend punts down the river, cycling along cobbled streets on a bike bedecked with daisies and a wicker basket, mid-week escapes to tearooms, and personal quests to find the best reading nook in each library – is one I have clutched close to my heart throughout the arduous application process, months of revision and exams, and the anxious wait for results.

AFTER: It turns out that formals are more about stuffing your face with as much cake as possible than discussions of literature, the punts are overrun with tourists and thus highly unappealing, my bike (tragically sans basket) has a puncture that has gone unfixed for weeks, cute tearooms are both expensive and impractical, and people keep stealing my favourite spot in the library. None of my whimsical dreams of Cambridge have come true, but neither have any of my anxious nightmares. I haven’t yet sobbed over an essay at 2am, my teabag stash is still going strong, and the only thing I’ve done a mad dash to Sainsbury’s for is melt-in-the-middle chocolate puddings, because, well, why not?

Rhiannon Shaw

BEFORE: It may have been deemed the fifth worst city in the world, but I like where I'm from. After being shuffled around as a child, Wolverhampton is my home – two and a half hours and almost fifty million light years away from the Cambridge I've created in my mind. I question how permeable the bubble of bops and bicycles really is and wonder if I’ll find myself with two identities by the end of term. I've put a lot of myself into this already already. The only disappointment I might have is, if now, I don't make the most of it. 

AFTER: ‘Make the most of it’ was the challenge I set myself. But, the moment I got here, I panicked. I spent a lot of time exhausted, upset and missing home terribly. The people around me seemed much more comfortable than I was – happier, cleverer and more awake, able to handle a Sunday night trip to Life and a 9am lecture the next morning. Thankfully, things have gotten better. I'm busy assistant-directing a play and rehearsing for another, spending long hours pouring over books in the library only to find nothing remotely useful and cycling to a 9am lecture after a Sunday night trip to Life. I underestimated how beautiful it can be to drunkenly do the Macarena with friends who were having an essay crisis just hours before.

Isobel Laidler

BEFORE: As an English fresher, I think I can be forgiven my hopelessly romantic attitude towards studying at Cambridge. Living in Cumbria, the mental image painted of Cambridge over the years has been predominantly influenced by Evelyn Waugh (I know that was The Other Place, but you catch my drift) and the Bloomsbury fraternity. I expect Cambridge students to be forward-thinkers, emulating those they secretly consider their forefathers, with their ink-stained fingertips, tired academic eyes and enthusiastic march down Senate House Passage, requisite pile of battered books in hand. And a healthy dose of romantic mist encircling all of them.

AFTER: Adolescent faces with swollen eyes and sore noses complete the image that must have always existed in Cambridge; that of sleep-deprived, soft-skinned students – neither adults nor children – burrowing through words, trying to divine meaning in their addled states. In my first week, I was told that Cambridge is essentially an ‘anthropological experiment.’ I hadn’t believed that so many aspects of life here would conform to my frankly quite bohemian, romantic imaginings, and in truth it doesn’t – the reality of essay deadlines and reading lists always permeates through the mist. There is always someone, however, who is willing to live that little bit of the illusion with you, to take you through that unlocked window or hold that clumsy conversation in the rain on Trinity Bridge.

Lucy Morgan

BEFORE: While my friends have all began university already, I’ve had a lot of time to picture what my life will be like at Cambridge. I hope I will find a group of people who accept my quirks as easily as their own and who are truly interested in learning. But then I remember the dreary English weather and the pressurised atmosphere I experienced during my final exams in high school, and I’m not so optimistic. My experience of Cambridge is likely to swing between both ends of the spectrum at times, but, for the most part, to be somewhere in the middle. This realisation allows me to board the plane to England, feeling relatively confident that my hopes won’t end up smashed on the cobblestones. 

AFTER: Cambridge life has both fulfilled and disappointed my expectations. Every fresher I’ve met so far has been friendly, lectures have been engaging, and I’ve emerged relatively unscathed (yet bewildered) from my more intensive supervisions. But the bustle of Cambridge life has left me little time to feel like I’m making any ‘lifelong friends’, despite having met many people I really appreciate. I know such things don’t happen straight away, but the absence has made me miss my old, established group back home. It’s not perfect, but it never will be and I can return after Christmas break with the confidence that there is a place for me here, and a life waiting to be further developed.

David Ifere

BEFORE: My excitement at the prospect of going to Cambridge has been tempered ever so slightly by my reading list, which arrived on my birthday. That’s when reality set in. Faced with the prospect of so much work, how I am to find the infamous ‘work-life balance’? How do you make time for all the parties and social events while still adhering to the academic standards? I imagine I and all the other freshers will spend the first term trying to find that balance, but the best thing is: there’s no one right answer.

AFTER: Cambridge has been the expected whirlwind so far – getting to grips with the weekly work load and trying to cram in as many other activities as I possibly can. It may sound strange, but I expected Cambridge to be full of high-powered, intellectual robots and while there are undoubtedly a few of those lurking around, my assumption has been proved wrong. Instead, I find Cambridge students to be hardworking, interesting, friendly and masters of multi-tasking, including fitting in Life on a Sunday night. I’m still adapting to this strange new world (as well as to significantly less sleep), but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. 

Nicola Jaccarini

BEFORE: ‘Conditional offer for the University of Cambridge…’ Where I was and what I was doing when I saw that email subject line pop up on my screen with those tantalising words will be forever etched in my memory. It may sound cliché, but studying at Cambridge is a long-held dream come true. With all these years of dreaming and waiting, my expectations for the university and the city are huge. I’m excited to meet and study under the guidance of those who wrote the majority of my undergraduate textbooks and eager to experience the collegiate life and sense of community missing from so many other universities.

AFTER: On the 29 October, I celebrated my one-month anniversary since my arrival in Cambridge. The place is more spectacular than I could have imagined and Darwin College has been warm and welcoming. Walking through Kings Parade still makes me feel like a tourist, and I constantly stumble across new side-streets each time I venture out. Cambridge has, as I had so dearly hoped it would, become my home away from home. I feel blessed to have this opportunity to spend nine months living and studying in this gem of a city, and find myself wishing time would pause, just briefly, so I could savour the experience for a little longer. 

Jonathon Goldstone

BEFORE: The time has finally come when I must get on with my life. Enough mucking about with gap year shenanigans – it's time to go to university! It's pretty nerve racking. What's the worst that could happen though? Well, I could completely burn out after working for twenty-four hours straight on a piece of work that ends up reading something like ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. This could happen, but I’m hopeful it won’t. The optimist in me thinks things will probably all work out. And when has he ever been wrong? 

AFTER: Now well into the first term of my Cambridge career and things are going pretty well so far. The workload hasn’t killed me (yet) and I have actually found plenty of like-minded people (yes, I am now part of a barbershop group). If I could, I would try to avail of every single opportunity that comes my way. But each time I think this, the looming spectre of the weekly essay rears its ugly head and knocks me back down to earth. And then I remember that I actually like my course, so it isn't all that bad.