I didn’t cry at my graduation. I always assumed I would bawl my eyes out but, as I walked onto Senate House lawn, sweating under my fur hood in 30-degree heat, my eyes were dry. I felt proud, triumphant, and very, very warm, but I didn’t feel sad. Mostly because I knew I was coming back.

For most of my graduate friends, this was likely the last time they would be in Cambridge. But I was coming back for an MPhil. Besides, I would be back in little over a month for the formidable Cambridge summer school job. And with that, came a relief.

There is a lot of pressure involved in graduating, which makes an already exhausting point in term even more tiring. Like the emotional year seven who cries, “This is our last fifth-period maths class on a Tuesday in 2019,” everything you do post-May Week could be the last time you do it. You Woo your last Wednesday, attend your last formal, and every time you say goodbye to a friend, it could well be the last time you’ll see them. It’s bittersweet, and, more than anything, overwhelming.

“The beauty of the post-grad is that you can skip the Granchester trip and go next year instead”

Finals are exhausting. Once I finished my exams and washed the Cava out of my hair, I wanted nothing more than to sleep for a week. But you can’t. You have to go to brunch, to Granchester, to the Fitzwilliam; you have to see your friends, see your acquaintances, see that girl you met in the smoking area who you always said you’d get coffee with. The beauty of the post-grad is that you can skip the Granchester trip and go next year instead

That is why I didn’t hesitate to take up a summer job here. Most people thought I was crazy to come back to Cambridge so soon, but with my Master’s funding up in the air, I wasn’t sure if I would make it back. Unlike undergrad, your place on a Master’s course isn’t guaranteed once you get the grades. You still need to prove you’ve secured the £27,000 for tuition and maintenance. With the outcome of my many funding applications only coming in August, I had to graduate without knowing if this would be the end or only the interval.

This complicated my feelings about graduation. On the one hand, I could relax, reassured that whatever I missed in this graduation, I could do in the next. On the other, if I didn’t make the most of graduation, and didn’t get funding, I would regret it forever. In a way, this reflected my feelings about post-grad in general.

Cambridge is a small city, and after three years, it can become suffocating. Every turn you take, you get a foreboding reminder of your academics, be that a college, a library, or someone stressed about their own subject. While everybody else drags themselves through Cambridge to freedom, I was dragging myself through Cambridge only to drag myself back. Part of me feared returning would be like going for a swim the day after you drowned.

“Cambridge doesn’t disappear once you graduate”

However, having spent a month back home, binging CSI: Miami and not really leaving the house, that fear has somewhat subsided. I made a hardline rule that I wouldn’t read for, listen to, or talk about my degree until September. As a certified linguistics nerd, that was hard. But now I’m excited to get back to it and to return to the city. It’s easy to forget the beauty of Cambridge, but with a little R&R, you remember why you came.

Whether that will still be the case by Michaelmas remains to be seen, but I can say that the prospect of coming back made graduation a lot easier. I didn’t need to hug every friend goodbye or rush around finding a present for my DoS, and Grad Revs didn’t need to be the best Wednesday Revs of my life. All of that could wait, and I could simply enjoy the day. Graduation has become a soft-launch of leaving Cambridge, and I have the next year to ease into the reality of not living in this city, and not living next to my friends.

I know not everybody has the option of a post-grad here. The wider point, though, is that Cambridge doesn’t disappear once you graduate. There is a tendency to see graduation as the locking of the door, shutting you out of the city and the people forever. That isn’t the case. You can — and should — come back to Cambridge and finish the list of things you wish you had done while you were here. Cambridge isn’t gone forever, it’s only at the end of the train line.