The World Outside
Tides are turning
At the risk of sounding a little smug, Rob Peal recognises a change of tone in conversations with his fun loving compatriots at other universities as the outside world looms.
Your non-Cambridge friends will regret this when they graduate into unemployment.
When doing my A-levels four long years ago, it was clear who the victor was in ‘next university’ conversations amongst my friends. “Where are you going to university?” they would ask. “Cambridge,” I would reply apologetically. “Have fun!” would be the common response, as friends taunted me about the three boring years I had in stall.
In the subsequent holidays when I would meet up with olds pals returning from the party epicentres of Manchester, Leeds and Bristol, they would regale me with tales of the mental club nights, cheap booze, plentiful drugs and endless casual sex. My anecdotes about walks to Granchester and punitive library fines didn’t quite cut it. Whereas my Facebook pages betrayed a couple of rubbish bops and endless pictures of rowing on the Cam, their Facebook pages showed a whirlwind of carefree hedonism. For the first two years at Cambridge, my peers were confident that they couldn’t think of anything worse than my diligent and ascetic life at Cambridge.
However, when I meet up with many people studying at other universities now, there is a distinct change of tone in our conversations. They suddenly seem desperately interested in how many hours I work a week. They quiz me on the nature and frequency of my essays, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the size of my reading list and blurting out such queries as “so are the other students there like really clever?” Far from the brash boasting of their crazy lifestyles, those hedonistic, drunken, sleep-in-all-day ‘real’ students now seem almost pathetically contrite about their last three years, and eager to know more about mine.
In a conversation with a Cambridge friend who had been on a trip to Leeds for a 21st birthday party, I think we struck on the root of this significant change of tone. Facing the outside world after three years of careless fun and very little work, the hedonists are beginning to regret and even feel guilty about how they have spent their time. University as a perpetual party may produce some fantastic Facebook albums, but facing a tough job market with bad grades and a stinking overdraft is not an enviable position. Many of them, having once been so assured that Cambridge is lame, are beginning to seem, dare I say it, envious.
Of course, the mores of student conversation do not permit them to admit this explicitly. Rather, it is expressed in a flurry of novel and rather touching interest about life at Cambridge University. I realize the potential for this observation for being horribly conceited, but it is meant to be reassuring. To all of those first years weeping about the lack of fun you are having, you may not have many laughs whilst you are here, but you will probably have the last laugh once you are gone.
