What Is It Really Like to Study at Cambridge?

People usually describe Cambridge from the outside: the architecture, the traditions, the reputation. What follows is an attempt to describe it from the inside, based on my MPhil at Jesus College. It is one person's experience of one college in one year, so treat it as a description rather than a rule.

Cambridge is a collegiate university

This is one of the defining characteristics of the place, and it is the thing applicants most often nod along to without really understanding.

You belong to two institutions at once. The University, through your faculty or department, is responsible for your subject: lectures, seminars, supervision, examinations. Your college is responsible for you as a person living in Cambridge: accommodation, meals, welfare, societies, facilities, and much of your social life.

A college is not simply where you sleep. In my case it was where most of the unplanned parts of the experience happened. At dinner I might be sitting beside somebody researching a field I knew almost nothing about while I was working on Development Studies. Historians, economists, scientists, English students, people three years into a PhD, all around the same table. Very little of that would have happened if I had only been attached to my department.

Dinner table conversations

The formal dinners were the clearest example. One of them was at the Master's Lodge at Jesus College, and among the guests was a former Secretary of State for International Development, associated with the period in which DFID was created. I later went on to work for DFID myself. I would not claim any causal link there, and I did not have a relationship with that person. What mattered was the atmosphere: when you are 22, simply being in a room where those conversations are happening does something to your sense of what is possible.

I remember talking to an academic at one of these dinners about what I wanted to do afterwards. Not a formal careers conversation, just an interested person asking reasonable questions about my ambitions. Those conversations are hard to design deliberately, and they are one of the things a college quietly provides.

Relationships that reappear years later

Recently I was on Y Combinator's cofounder matching platform and came across somebody I used to have dinner table conversations with at Jesus. That was a strange and rather pleasant moment. It is not the polished alumni network story that universities put in their brochures; it is simply that if you spend a year eating with a group of unusually driven people, some of them keep turning up in your life.

Being 22 during the MPhil

I finished my MPhil at 22, which gave me a slightly unusual Cambridge experience. Academically I was a postgraduate. In age I was roughly where many undergraduates were, so I straddled both communities.

That is worth understanding if you are applying. Undergraduate communities can be very tight, partly because those students spend three or four years together in the same college. Postgraduate teaching is more commonly organised centrally through the faculty or department, so your subject cohort and your college cohort can be almost entirely separate groups of people. Some colleges have much larger postgraduate communities than others.

For people arriving at a different stage of life, perhaps with a partner, children, or a career already underway, that composition matters a great deal. It is not that one college is objectively better. It is a question of fit.

College choice matters more than applicants sometimes realise

You will often be told that the college does not really matter. I think that is only half true. You can have a wonderful time at any Cambridge college, and the degree is the same. But colleges genuinely differ, and pretending otherwise is not helpful.

They differ in location, architecture, accommodation, food, libraries, facilities, endowment, the grants and subsidies available, the balance of undergraduates and postgraduates, traditions, community and the depth of pastoral provision. Cambridge has 31 colleges, and they are not interchangeable.

Some are considerably wealthier than others, and that has practical consequences. A difference of £50 a week in accommodation costs sounds minor on a spreadsheet. For a student from a lower socioeconomic background it can be the difference between a comfortable year and a stressful one. I am deliberately not quoting figures for particular colleges, because those change; the point is to look them up properly for the colleges you are considering.

I spoke recently to a former colleague who had done an MBA at Oxford. Looking back, he said he wished he had understood how much the college choice could shape the experience. He had treated it as an administrative detail. It is not.

Jesus College

Jesus College was founded in 1496. The chapel is substantially older than that: it incorporates medieval fabric from the former nunnery of St Radegund, which occupied the site before the college existed. I mention the dates because they are often muddled, but the dates are not really the interesting part.

The interesting part is what it feels like to live around buildings of that age. The chapel was one of the most beautiful spaces I have ever spent time in, and after a few weeks it also became somewhere you simply walked past on your way somewhere else. Both of those things stay true at once.

Cycling through Cambridge

I got into cycling at Cambridge, not as a hobby but because it was how you got anywhere. I would ride from near Jesus towards the faculty where my Development Studies lectures, seminars and supervisions took place, and depending on the route I might go through or around places like King's and Clare, glancing into college gardens on the way.

My accommodation was very close to Jesus and to Sidney Sussex. I had a friend at Sidney Sussex whom I had known from school, and we would have dinner together sometimes. Something that would be a tourist destination almost anywhere else can become part of an ordinary Tuesday.

The knee injury, and what pastoral support actually means

Towards the end of my master's year I injured my knee badly enough that I later needed an operation. For a period I was on crutches, hobbling around Cambridge and unable to cycle anywhere.

Jesus helped me arrange physiotherapy, and the college offered to fund taxis if I needed them to get to teaching. I never actually took them up on the taxis, but I remember being genuinely grateful that the offer existed. That is the moment college pastoral support stopped being an abstract line in a prospectus for me. It was not a welfare policy; it was somebody helping when something had gone wrong.

History becoming real

I remember seeing Stephen Hawking in Cambridge and having that slightly surreal reaction of thinking, I am actually in the same space as Stephen Hawking. No conversation, no encounter, just the fact of it.

The same feeling attaches to the material you study. I was reading economics and development, and John Maynard Keynes is the obvious Cambridge example. I also worked on Singaporean development and later travelled to Singapore, and knowing that Lee Kuan Yew had studied at Cambridge created another line between what I was reading and the city I was reading it in. Ideas have geography. That is not a list of famous alumni; it is the sense that the arguments in your reading list were partly formed a few streets away.