Weeks start on Thursdays

This, essentially, was how my first meeting with my Director of Studies [DoS] went on Tuesday of Week 0 of my first term at Cambridge, two days before my first lecture. That moment was when I understood why Cambridge students wouldn’t be caught dead without an electronic calendar.

The academic year at British universities is divided into three terms, which is not the case in most other countries where two semesters are used. At Oxford and Cambridge, these terms are only eight weeks long, which means a very fast pace, under which ever day, even every hour, counts. Any Oxbridge student would confirm that. Some courses (fortunately not my course, Engineering) even have lectures on Saturday mornings. Supervisions can start as late as eight o’clock in the evening. In addition to all this, rowers have to get up at five or six o’clock in the morning. (Personally I would not recommend rowing, but some people do like it.)

When every day is so precious, it’s impossible to have a regular weekly timetable as a school might. On the lecture timetable, every lecture has bracketed numbers like [1] or [2-7] which indicate which weeks it runs in. If a student finds the mysterious word LABS in their lecture timetable, they must look at the separate lab rota, a table with 60 rows and 56 columns, where to the right of their group number and under the particular date there will be an abbreviation like LM, CA, T, L, S or IEM. (The rota is from last year, so it has to be moved back by one day.) Finally, the list of abbreviations will explain what that is and where and when it runs. Even one-off lectures or practicals are scheduled well in advance like this; if the rota said that on Tuesday of Week 8 at 11:00 I had lathe and milling machine training, forgetting about it over the previous eight weeks would be no excuse. If I had to decipher where I was supposed to go every day like this, I would surely forget these things. So, I had to swap the vast printed table, with separate instructions just for reading it, for iCalendar files, which everyone at Cambridge from departments to students’ unions publishes on their websites. Without a computer, managing one’s schedule is practically impossible.

The reader may have been confused by some items of Cambridge jargon, so I should get to my main point and explain what that fearsome timetable actually consists of. Lectures take up only ten or eleven hours per week; in the British concept of a university, independent study is much more important. Four to fifteen hours per week are taken up by various experiments, seminars, workshop sessions etc., collectively called labs. These can be projects like building robots from Lego or designing a bridge – other grantees who study engineering at Cambridge have already written about them here, so I won’t repeat that. Between eight and eighteen hours per week are taken up by homework [examples papers]. Every week, two or three papers with ten questions each are released, before the relevant lectures take place. Each lecture then covers the material of about three of the ten questions. The answers are always printed on the back pages of the papers, but the solutions must be written up for the most important part of studying at Cambridge or Oxford: discussing the solutions with an academic (“supervisions”, which are called tutorials at Oxford). Supervisions are timetabled every week or every two weeks, and altogether only take two hours per week. Supervisions take place in groups of only two or three students, because their purpose is for students to ask for explanations of specific questions, or other aspects of the subject, or even to ask for harder exercises if they didn’t have any trouble with the examples papers. There are also several other tasks which are not tied to lectures. These are effectively purely independent study, although the possibility to ask for help at a supervision or the “helpdesk” is there. In the first term they are CAD in the Solidworks software and programming in the Python language. I also attend an optional German course every week.

What is it all for, you might ask? This complex system exists so that the course can adapt to students: so that nobody is held back by needless revision and, equally, nobody is left behind. The department could have chosen to run one mathematics class for all 326 students and save money, but instead it has divided the year into a “fast” (2 hours/week) and “standard” (3 hours/week) stream, following on from A-Level with and without Further Maths respectively. It could force experienced programmers to sit through beginners’ programming classes, but it doesn’t – experienced programmers can simply finish all the coursework tasks in one day and be done with them for the rest of the term. If, perhaps, the world champion in Lego robotics came to the university, nobody would force them to build a simple gearbox all over again. And if a student is not coping with the examples papers and not understanding the lectures, they can ask about it at supervisions. Everyone can study according to their experience and abilities; that is the whole purpose of Oxford and Cambridge.

And, of course, Cambridge’s teaching weeks start on Thursdays and end on the following Wednesday. That’s just the way it is and we must get used to it.