A year ago, having finished first year, and making my preparations to return to Cambridge, I found myself drowning in an utterly consuming well of anxiety. In spite of its scenic spires, and world-class facilities, Cambridge doesn’t always feel like my favourite place.

I’ve found so much joy in this city; from new friends and new freedoms to coffee shops that are generous enough to let you sit in for two hours with one latte. I’d be offering you a rose-tinted lens of the life of a Cambridge student if I pretended it was always a nice place to study, though. Cambridge can be cruel, and it leaves many of us feeling worse for wear.

“Cambridge can be cruel, and it leaves many of us feeling worse for wear”

Realising my first year had left me feeling pretty burnt out was hard to accept. I wanted Cambridge to be a real-life Pinterest board of cosy libraries and friendly pub culture. It felt like admitting defeat when I began to acknowledge that maintaining healthy working habits, getting the most out of Cambridge beyond my degree, and achieving as highly as I wanted to, were three mutually exclusive circles in the Venn diagram of my life at Cambridge.

So, I’m at one with the 59% of Cambridge students who feel like we lack the capacity to fulfil our full potential here. I don’t know how to fix it, because it’s not my job to  know the answer to this total mess. Maybe it’s a reading week, maybe it’s ten-week terms, maybe it’s individualised faculty adjustments that tackle actual students’ needs. But I do know that the Cambridge degree, in all its many forms, needs a pretty damning overhaul. I should be able to say ‘too much’ without being told it’s my own job to fix it with a 30-minute meditation each day, or by stopping socialising during the week.

“It’s not my job to know the answer to this total mess”

20-year-olds shouldn’t feel guilty when they unshackle themselves from their desks at 5pm. We should be able to manage our workloads and also take a day off each week. We’re kidding ourselves if we believe that libraries are open until 1am to accommodate ‘different working schedules’; they’re open until 1am because sometimes, we need them until 1am. Finalists should have the time to prepare for graduate life, but that’s a luxury I know I’ll be struggling to carve out time for.

Sounds grim, doesn’t it? It probably seems like I’m taking dreading my final year pretty seriously. Don’t get me wrong, some of the time I am. At the end of the day though, for most of us at least, a degree is a means to an end. Plenty of us find more valuable lessons outside of our degree than from within it. And I do like to remind myself that no employer is ever going to ask me what my supervisor thought of my opinions on ‘commas and the threat of apocalypse’ (circa. a dreary Monday in week five of Michaelmas, year two).

“Being a Cambridge student is simultaneously a blessing and a curse”

There’s light at the end of the tunnel. There’s potential for us to all be more than matriculants, and it’s that knowledge that is helping me go into my final year as a Cambridge student. Being a student is a blessing, and at times, being a Cambridge student is simultaneously a blessing and a curse.

It’s okay if Cambridge isn’t everything you hoped for. It’s okay if you don’t love everything about it here, or everything this institution represents. And if that sounds at all reassuring, or even slightly relatable, then welcome.

Welcome to Fumbles of a Finalist. We’re all friends here. We’re all a bit nervous about supervisions, and we all want to be out of the library by 5pm. We're all a bit shoddy at our degrees sometimes, and sometimes we want to have a go at being real adults, instead of being coddled and restricted by overly parental colleges.

Join me for monthly instalments of a column designed to make you feel better about being a little bit crap at Cambridge.