First Year Evaluation

I struggle to believe that the academic year has finished already. We have had only 20 weeks of lectures, yet this is a quarter of my degree. And then exams. These were four 3-hour-long papers. They were testing what we should have learned in the first year of our engineering course. Having finished my exams, I feel this is a good time to evaluate my first year at Cambridge now.

There are many, many societies at Cambridge. To illustrate this, just consider the engineering-centred societies. There is Cambridge University Eco Racing (CUER), a society designing, building and racing solar powered cars; Cambridge University Space Flight, they shoot rockets to high altitudes; Cambridge University Autonomous Vehicle, a society that makes submarines with artificial intelligence; and finally Full Blue Racing, a group of students who take part in the International Formula Student Competition. My motto for the first term was ‘give it a go’ so that I could see which societies I would really like to join. I tried nearly everything I wanted. However, the consequence of that was that I did not commit to anything. Over all, I was happy as I tried high jump, javelin throw, capoeira and others.

From past experience I know that if I don’t set myself clearly defined aims, I will not manage to do much and I will waste a lot of time. Therefore, I decided to do my work as soon as I got it. I regularly attend dance classes and competitions, do break dancing once a week and do something for CUER every week. Possibly I set myself too many targets so I have not managed to reach them all, but I have a feeling that I was efficient at the end of the term so I felt happy.

In the third term, I minimized my time commitments so that I could spend more time revising.

Regarding academia, I have some mixed feelings. I was looking forward to nearly all the lectures. Looking back, I don’t understand how come we spent so much time on complex current. Similarly, I couldn’t believe we didn’t spend only one lecture on Fourier series. It seems to me that we could have done so much more! Laboratory exercises were also very good, especially building one’s own radio and a Lego Mindstorms robot.

Engineering supervision were rather disappointing. I thought there were going to be extremely challenging intellectual exercises that would inflate my brain, but they weren’t. They turned out to be, as also our College Master confirmed, a safety net. Apparently, they were introduced to make sure that students do not fall behind the quick pace of the lectures. I must admit that there would not be time to do anything beyond the course in many of the supervisions as I have struggled with some of the example sheet questions, but there was space in others. However, it is partly my own fault because I did waste some time in supervision as I had not revised example sheets before the supervisions and I had not asked our supervisors to go beyond the syllabus.

To sum up, I have enjoyed my first year experience and I know what to focus on next year.

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