Wow, can it really be? My last blog post about my time in Cambridge. I know I've said this before, but it seems like October was only yesterday. I can clearly see myself back then being one of the lost and naive freshers who struggled to find his way both around college and Cambridge as a whole. My goodness how nine months can fly by so quickly! On the one hand, I am relieved to have completed this year from an academic perspective, but at the same time, I feel sad that it had to come to an end.
As you can probably deduce from my previous blog post, I am no longer in Cambridge but back at home. Thus, this is the first and last blog post that I will be writing on US soil. In addition, I find it fitting that my image for this blog post is an American flag, as my first blog post had the image of a British flag on it. Things coming together in full circle I guess. :)
It's incredible sometimes how experiences can shape and influence the way you think. In the final days before I said good-bye to my friends back at MIT last year, I was excited for the adventure that Cambridge offered but saddened that I was leaving behind a life so familiar to me and throwing myself into a completely unfamiliar environment. In less than a year, I seem to have found a new familiar amongst the very unfamiliar that confronted me in October. While I am excited to see my friends again, the MIT experience I remember from almost a year ago now seems less familiar and less appealing than it was before.
Will I miss everything about Cambridge? Absolutely not. However, by attending university in a country, in a system that is very different from mine, the pros and cons that either has to offer become more sharply pronounced, and having experiences in both academic institutions has made me more appreciative of what either has to offer. It has broadened me perspective and made me realise just how much diversity there is, even amongst those who speak essentially the same language. For goodness sake, in one blog post, I gave a list of like 20+ words that differ between the two countries.
So now that I have spent two years at MIT and one year at Cambridge, just what can both sides offer? Let's begin!
1) Niche culture
Both MIT and Cambridge are unique in their own ways. For example, MIT is an engineering school, and as a result, its student body is very technical. Thus, there is an implicit assumption amongst students that the people to whom they are speaking also share such similar expertise. Conversations tend to be more technical, bordering on nerdy, and don't be surprised to hear jokes (or puns) based on academic concepts.
The niche-like nature of MIT extends even further into accommodation. Because our accommodation is not based on the academic courses that each dorm offers (that doesn't exist), dorm cultures are allowed to foster and develop because people are able to choose dorms (or frats / sororities) that provide them the social / cultural environment most attuned to their personality. That is not to say that culture does not exist at the college level in Cambridge, but my impression is that the college culture is more homogeneous across colleges. To appreciate the niche nature of Cambridge, we should examine it more from a university level.
Cambridge was founded in 1209, making it older than MIT by more than 600 years. Cambridge takes pride in its tradition, even if these traditions may seem somewhat anachronistic in today's world. For example, the Tripos system is something that is unique to Cambridge, and from my discussions with other British-educated students, this scheme was almost nothing like anything they had experienced before, save perhaps the A-levels. The niche nature of Cambridge derives more from the institution itself and its devotion to the methods and practices that I imagined were developed and codified in the early years of its existence, long before my existence to say the least! :)
I sometimes joked with my Cambridge friends that I was leaving one bubble for another, and while that makes it sound like nothing really changed for me culturally, that couldn't be further from the truth. My time at Cambridge has made me more cognisant of how our perceptions can become limited when we become comfortable in a certain environment, which makes it difficult to adopt different, but equally effective practices for carrying out one's daily life (or academic learning). One key to enjoying your time at Cambridge is to maintain an open mind. Of course, don't do anything that goes way beyond your comfort zone, but do push that zone a little bit. You didn't come to Cambridge just so you could live your life exactly as you have been before!
2) Academic systems
MIT and Cambridge are some of the best universities in the world, and that is in no small part due to the quality of their academics. However, they teach the material and examine your understanding in very different ways. Yes, they both use lectures to teach and introduce material, but it is how they review and reinforce the material that varies. MIT prefers to put the review / examination all in one term, so it packs in a lot of homework (problem sets) into a term along with some exams before the final exam. In addition, we have recitations at least twice a week for each class, where we do a variety of things varying from reviewing the material from the lecture to discussing problem set questions. Thus, the pressure during term is extremely high because of the high volume of academic commitments / assignments.
While that can be somewhat stressful for students (it catches Cambridge students by surprise when they do the exchange at MIT), MIT does have a lot of resources to guide you through. In addition to all of the recitations, all recitation leaders are required to hold office hours, which is an additional opportunity for students to come and ask questions. Furthermore, although students are assigned to recitations, they are free to attend those of other recitation leaders to better enforce the material. Office hours are open to everyone, regardless of recitation assignment. As a result of all of the constant reviewing (problem sets, recitations, office hours) students are able to learn and then internalise that material well during the course of the term, so by the time of the final exam, they should be well prepared.
The most noticeable downside to MIT's system for me is that the student-to-teacher ratios are quite high, meaning that while recitations and office hours are supposed to provide greater assistance to students, a single teacher / recitation leader can only do so much to help out all of the confused students he/she has at recitation / office hours. Thus, students run the risk of attending a recitation / office hours only to find that they couldn't get their questions answered because the teacher was just too overwhelmed.
Cambridge avoids this issue through the supervisions, which are where students meet in small groups (2 - 3 people) and discuss the provided examples papers (remember, the equivalent of MIT problem sets). These small groups are great because they allow you to ask and discuss any questions that you have on the material. Thus, you get to flesh out each question to make sure that you have a thorough understanding. The downside is that we have so few of them (a couple of times per term for each class), and as I soon realised, an hour is not a lot of time! In addition, the productivity of the supervision, while largely driven by the students, is also dependent on the supervisor. An incompetent supervisor who cannot answer your questions or provides unhelpful answers can undermine the advantages of the supervision system, whereas at MIT, because we are not formally required to attend the recitations assigned to us in most cases, we can attend recitations of other people. When word gets out that one recitation leader is very good, more often than not you will see students swarm to the recitations led by that person.
An incompetent supervisor would not be so problematic if it wasn't the case that switching supervisors is difficult to obtain from a logistics perspective. My DoS (remember, director of studies, similar to an advisor at MIT) would say in emails to us at the beginning of term that we should let him know if we had any problems with supervisors as he might be able to help. While I never did avail myself to that help (as students are supposed to be leading the supervisions, my philosophy was that I would just have to try harder to "guide" the supervisor in the right direction though critique and questions), some of my Cambridge friends did, with not so great results.
In the realm of supervisions / recitations, if we could combine the flexibility of MIT, the student-teacher-ratio of Cambridge, and perhaps find a nice middle ground between the recitation / supervision meeting frequencies of MIT and Cambridge, that would be great (at least for me)!
3) Accommodation
In many colleges, this appears to be a double-edged sword because often (as was the case for me), colleges have two sides to them. One side is very new and renovated, and the other side is very old and seemingly in much need of renovation. Depending on which side you are placed, your opinions of accommodation will vary greatly. Fortunately, I was placed on the newer, renovated side., and my goodness was it amazing. Hands down much better than my accommodation at MIT!
Where to begin? Personal bathroom, which I appreciated even more when I learned (or is it learnt? :P) of an incident in our shared shower back at my MIT accommodation. Amenities that I don't have at MIT but did have at Cambridge included a desk lamp, multiple chairs (including a rolly!), a duvet, notice board, Ethernet cable (generally more secure and reliable than WiFi). In addition, the weekly cleaning by the bedder, while something I was somewhat apprehensive about at first (we don't have people go into our room as frequently in such capacity at MIT), turned out to be quite useful. They are very professional (as they should be) and do a great job ensuring that the entire building is kept clean. While my MIT accommodation does have cleaning people, they perform much limited functions. Rooms can be a lot messier, and our kitchens (or gyp) are nowhere as clean as the ones I saw in my accommodation. It says something when you get happy that there are no insects (ants, cockroaches) crawling around at any point during the school year. Yes, Cambridge, you win this one by leaps and bounds.
4) Food
Unfortunately for Cambridge, the benefits it offered with accommodations were "compensated" in what I found to be lower quality of food services with respect to price. First, by coming from the US to the UK, I'm already taking a hit due to the exchange rate, as I found prices here in the UK to be numerically equivalent to those in the US (if we ignore units for the moment), making everything more expensive. In addition, because the UK diet seemed to be smaller than mine, the definition of a "single portion" was smaller, meaning that not only I was paying more because of the price itself but also because of the smaller amount of food per serving.
As someone who consumes more food than the average person, I did not like the à la carte system in buttery as much as the buffet style system at MIT dorms because I now got penalised for eating more unlike at MIT, where we pay a flat amount at the beginning of each term for a certain number of meals each day during term. The MIT scheme favours me because more food consumed lowers the cost per food item. However, as was pointed out to me by my MIT friends and even some of the returning Cambridge students, for those who do not eat as much, the à la carte system works better because the money they have to pay doesn't need to take into account the more voracious appetites of others like myself.
The counter though is that the buffet system at MIT provides a cushion for the times when people get a dish that they don't like. Whereas you will have to pay additional money for another dish at Cambridge, at MIT, you just get another dish, no questions asked. I guess it depends how often that happens to you, but when food quality can be unpredictable (it is college / university food after all), that sort of insurance can be useful.
While pricing can go either way, there are several other factors that make me prefer MIT dining. First, during the main dining hours (I don't count food served in the bar or outside because it is noticeably more expensive than dining hall food), none of the food is made to order. Two things that I miss from MIT are the omelette and stir-fry stations, where you can tell the chef what you want in your stir-fry or omelette, and they will make it for you. That helps to provide variety and allows you to customise the food you're getting the way you want.
Another factor about MIT dining halls that I like are the hours. They are much longer than they are at Cambridge. In addition, you are allowed to stay in the dining hall outside of dining hours (they just cordon off the food service area), making it a great place to socialise at all hours of the day. Not the case at Cambridge. This is partially driven by the fact that other events outside of dining hours such as formals are held in the dining hall, but as someone who did not go super-crazy with formal events, this multi-purpose dining hall was less appealing socially. Now to be fair, the Cambridge dining halls do serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner (only one MIT dining hall serves lunch). However, brunch and dinner everyday isn't so difficult to get used to I think (I couldn't go back for lunch on most days when I was at MIT in any case). It's what people do on weekends here at school (both MIT and Cambridge) anyways.
The final factor that I prefer about MIT dining over Cambridge dining is flexibility. This is largely tied in with the fact that MIT dorms are not as isolated from one another as Cambridge colleges are. At MIT, you can eat at any dorm that offers dining services (not all of them do due to size - remember they are much smaller than Cambridge colleges!) at no additional cost. That is not the case for at least some of the colleges. At mine, they tack on a cover charge. Another college doubled the price of each dish for non-college members! Yikes. As if colleges weren't isolated enough, this only makes them more so because now people from other colleges will find it much harder to have meals / socialise with friends / acquaintances who are members of the college. Interacting with people outside of the place where you live can be refreshing because it prevents you from living inside a bubble that is your dorm or college. So sorry, Cambridge. MIT wins this one fair and square.
5) Extracurricular Activities
MIT and Cambridge offer a wealth of extracurricular activities, and without going into too much detail, I can assure you that you'll find plenty of extracurriculars (clubs or societies, whichever you might know them as) to do. If you're really missing MIT, chances are that you'll be able to pursue the same extracurriculars that you were participating in back at MIT. However, Cambridge's massive size gives it a distinctive advantage of being able to offer many extracurriculars at two levels of participation: the college level and the university level, the difference being that the latter has a much larger time commitment. Because MIT is not as large, it is almost impossible to offer a similar amount of extracurricular activities at a dorm level, meaning that essentially all extracurriculars are at the college (i.e. school-wide) level. Consequently, the amount of extracurricular activities you can do at MIT becomes more limited because the time commitments are higher, whereas at Cambridge, you have the ability to fully participate in more activities by doing some at the college level since their time commitments are lower. It was what allowed me for example to row this year because the time commitment was more amenable to my schedule (or timetable). Both schools offer a variety of extracurriculars, but the ability to provide multiple levels of participation gives Cambridge the edge here. Take advantage of it if you can!
6) UROP
UROP stands for "Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program" (or is it programme? :P), which is a great opportunity for students to perform research in their areas of interest under the guidance of professors or graduate students during the school year. While both schools do offer this opportunity, MIT's program is much more accessible to students, the main reason being that you can do UROP's during the actual school terms! For anyone coming to MIT, that is one of the main shining points of MIT academics. The ability to be able to apply your academic prowess to research or another project not only stretches your understanding of the material but can also teach you concepts that you may not have covered in your current classes. For example, I learned a lot of advanced statistics in one UROP that I had not even gotten close to learning about in my classes, largely because I had to implement them in code so as to analyse data. You can only learn so much in a classroom setting, so with regards to UROP, no doubt a win for the MIT side of things.
7) School "breaks"
Both MIT and Cambridge are a lot of work, and regardless of how you arrange your schedule, there are no shortcuts to getting that work completed. The approach though to completing that work varies drastically between both schools. Slight tangent before I begin (perhaps this might have been better suited for the academics portion but better now than never!): compared to MIT, Cambridge feels significantly more cumulative in its teaching. Often professors would say, "You'll recall from Part IA..." for example in reference to material they had learned two years ago. At MIT, we would not say that. We might on occasion, but more often than not, we will devote a short period of time at the beginning of the course to a "refresher" in which they will remind us of key concepts from pre-requisites.
So back to contrasting the methods by which work is completed! Whereas MIT likes to pack all of the learning, revision, and examining into a single term, Cambridge prefers to teach the material first and then examine at the end of the year, giving us more time to revise. The benefits and drawbacks are quite apparent. MIT's terms are much more stressful than Cambridge terms because of all of the work that they pack into a single term. We get problem sets every week that are graded (or marked), with at least two or three quizzes before our final exam. The learning is at a much faster pace, and the establishment of long-term memory is not as readily available (hence why we constantly need refreshers at the beginning of courses). However, as a result, that means during vacations, we actually can relax and not do any work over the break. While it does mean that we will "forget" a good portion of what we have learned during the term, we have the freedom to revise it should we choose without the pressure of exams hanging over our heads. In addition, we get a three-day weekend at least once a month, which is always a very welcomed break from the constant pressure of work that we get each week. This is the one thing I think Cambridge students who don't participate in CME fail to fully grasp when they ask me about MIT, but then again, I guess you want what you don't have.
Cambridge terms, at least the first two, are a lot less stressful because you get to focus solely on learning the material without the constant pressure of graded examples sheets hanging over your head each week for every course. I felt much more relaxed, and even when Cambridge students started lamenting about "Week 5 Blues" (similar to what MIT students feel half way through a term), I didn't feel "blue" at all because the workload and stress was much lower than it would have been at MIT. The downside is that there are no real breaks because you are constantly expected to continuously revise since exams aren't until the end of the year. During the Christmas vacation, my DoS expected us to do at least three years worth of Tripos papers. Lent term modules build off of the Michaelmas term ones, so if you don't revise, you'll find yourself behind at the beginning of Lent term. I also wish that Cambridge courses would provide more examples sheets during term to provide greater practice of the material. While weekly problem sets were certainly stressful at MIT, I have developed a greater appreciation for them because they helped me to internalise the material.
To say that one arrangement is superior to the other doesn't seem to make much sense here because I know that people's learning styles are different. While I personally prefer the MIT system because of its constant revision in spite of the higher pressure, several returning CME Cambridge students told me that it was too fast to their liking because it didn't give them time to really revise and understand the material. Thus, I will leave it to you the reader to decide which system fits you the best! Perhaps a mixture of both? :)
8) Novelty and Tradition
With respect to Cambridge, MIT is a very new school, and that difference in age definitely manifests itself in the school culture. MIT remains a very dynamic place, both in the student body and the administration, and a lot can change in a single year. Just this past year, my department did a complete overhaul of the graduation requirements, which will be enforced for next year's freshman class (class of 2020!?). Innovation and novelty are what drive the MIT community as a whole. While we do have "traditions" (e.g. graduation, dorm events), they don't leave the same impression on me compared to those at Cambridge.
Take for example formal halls. I don't know how long they have been existence, but the experience is fantastic. While I will say that the food quantity-to-price ratio does take a hit because there is greater focus on aesthetics (and wine) over actual food, it is worth attending at least once. These are very nice events where you get to dress up in suit (and gown!) and share a nice meal with your friends (or mates), and while that may be a little strange at MIT, knowing how to dress "smart" and behave well at such events is not entirely out of the ordinary (e.g. company events). To participate in such events that you know have such a rich and long history is mind-blowing when coming from a place like MIT.
Although there is a fine balance between tradition and being static and stuck in the past, many Cambridge practices have managed to stay on the better side of tradition, and they provide a very nice contrast to the life and atmosphere that is MIT, which is what you want to when you decide to go abroad for a year as far as I was concerned. No need to attend an MIT across the Atlantic when I have one right here in the US :)
In conclusion, I think it is safe to say that I gained a lot of newfound perspective by placing myself in an environment drastically different from the one that I was used to. Not only did it give me a new appreciation for the benefits that MIT had to offer, but it also cast a brighter light on ways in which the system could be different or "improved" with respect to what I saw at Cambridge. In addition, by being able to meet students with a very different background from my own (e.g. UK education vs. US education) and even meet some of my Cambridge CME counterparts, they helped to burst my MIT bubble in beneficial ways so that I have become more aware of how MIT (and Cambridge) can impact students depending on their personal academic or social preferences.
So to reiterate, was my time at Cambridge perfect? Absolutely not. Would I have chosen to participate given what I know now? Absolutely. Without a doubt a year that I will never forget, and for those of you who have decided to undertake this journey too, best of luck! You're going to be in for quite a ride, and to those of you who are thinking about it, I strongly encourage you to do so.
In the meantime, this is me signing off! Thank you to all of those who have been following me along this amazing journey! It has been a pleasure to share my experiences with you, and as always, feel free to reach out to me via the "Contact" section of the website. Cheers!