So you're off to Cambridge. Best of luck. This brief guide is an attempt to give you a sense of what's involved in living and working at Cambridge. I've included topics in no particular order, as they've come to me.
WHERE TO LIVE
Depending on where you work, you'll probably want to live in Petersfield,
Trumpington, or Castle Hill. East Chesterton or King's Hedges are good if you
want to be close to the science park, but not much in the way of neighbourhoods
and rather poor if you want easy access to the rest of the city. Romsey Town,
where I ended up living, is okay if you're commuting to Addenbrooke's Hospital
(though Trumpington is even better for this) but lousy if you have any regular
business at the colleges, nearly all of which are on the other side of a very
congested and pedestrianised city centre. The section of Romsey just over the
railway line also is home to some rough characters, though if you're used to
London these people are rather tame in comparison to some that you'd find in,
say, Camden Town. Romsey does offer the advantage of cheap, student-orientated
shops and cafés, although these are not as vibrant as you might expect,
since most of the student life takes place within the colleges. If you like the
idea of Romsey but can afford to live a bit closer in, you might consider
Petersfield, which has better pubs and is on the near side of the railway line.
I ended up living in Romsey because I made a quick decision. If I had it to do over again, and I were constrained to live in Cambridge, I'd choose Trumpington. Although Trumpington is part of the Cambridge city local authority and is closer to Cambridge city centre than, say, Romsey or King's Hedges, it retains many of the advantages of a country village: where else could one be a ten-minute cycle ride from the city centre and from Addenbrooke's, a five-minute walk from a Waitrose and several good, quiet pubs, and still in the midst of so much open space, including the fields around Addenbrooke's to the east and Grantchester to the west, and the woods along Vicar's Brook leading to the city centre. Add to this the fact that when you come north from Trumpington into the city, you end up on the west side of town, so you don't have to spend extra time traversing the city centre in order to get to the colleges. Although many of the houses in locations such as Alpha Terrace are sought after and expensive, Trumpington also contains some more modest, more affordable housing, including the former council houses around Byron Square, site of the village green.
Of course, if I had it to do over again and were not constrained to live in Cambridge, I'd choose north London. This may seem backwards, but the fact is that if you want to meet people and do things, especially if you're a postdoctoral scientist and therefore aren't affiliated with a Cambridge college, Cambridge really hasn't much on offer. Furthermore, if your work is fairly solitary and amenable to telecommuting, you can probably get away with coming to Cambridge just once or twice a week. Fast trains run to Cambridge from King's Cross and Finsbury Park and take just under an hour, buses from Stratford go directly via the M11 and take about an hour, and broadband network connectivity is widely available in London.
LIVING ROUGH
For short-term accommodation, the youth hostel is always an option, though
you'll likely be out of luck unless you reserve at least a day in advance. The
university's accommodation service in Silver Street has listings for short-stay
guest houses and for longer-term accommodation, but they won't give you any
information unless you turn up at their offices in person.
If you're like me, though, you travel light and are just as happy sleeping undisturbed outside as in — especially in the summertime or early autumn when it isn't particularly cold. The best places that I've found to sleep rough in Cambridge are the woods near Byron's Pool between Trumpington and Grantchester, and the woods near Vicar's Brook and Clare fields. Both of these are on the south-west side of Cambridge. Byron's Pool is a bit farther away but offers better potential for secluded bathing; the water is deep enough and the punts never travel farther upriver than the dam just north. To get to Byron's Pool, from Trumpington High Street follow Church Lane to Grantchester Road, and look for the entrance on the left just before you'd be crossing over the Cam, then walk or cycle all the way through the woods to the end of the path, where you have a fenced farm to the left and the Cam to the right.
Vicar's Brook isn't as good for bathing, since the path that runs along it is a pedestrian and cycle route into the city centre and since the brook is shallow and rather muddy. Nevertheless it's possible, and I've done it on summer days when I haven't wanted to take the time to go all the way to Byron's Pool or Addenbrooke's (see below).
If it's too cold for Byron's Pool or Vicar's Brook, don't worry, as there's a free shower at Addenbrooke's Hospital. It's for Addenbrooke's staff, but I've used it many times and nobody's challenged me. To find it, walk in at the main entrance, turn right, turn left immediately as you enter the shops area, then proceed straight out of the shops and towards the wards. To your left, just before you would pass the lifts, there's a door to a stairway. Descend this stairway to the basement, turn right into the corridor, immediately pass through a set of double doors and turn right towards the post room. Continue straight through tunnel junction 30, then turn left at junction 29, where you can't continue straight anymore. At junction 38, opposite the basement entrance, turn left into the corridor that houses the post room, porters' office, and access office. Walk past all of these on the left, and then on the left you'll see two gents toilets next to each other. The shower is in the one that's farther along. If you get lost trying to retrace your steps on the way out, you can exit the building at junction 38 and walk up the drive next to the incinerator.
If you find that you can't get into the shower at Addenbrooke's, or you don't want to go that far from the city centre, you can pay £2.50 for a shower at Kelsey Kerridge sports centre, on Gonville Place on the southeast side of Parker's Piece, just to the right of Parkside swimming pool. These are very nice, clean showers, and they're slightly cheaper than Parkside's.
If you're lucky enough to be affiliated with a college, the college may have a sports facility at which you can shower.
RENT OR BUY?
First of all, if you anticipate being in Cambridge for a couple of years or
more, and you have some money at your disposal, you should consider buying a
house. It may seem absurd especially if you're on a fixed-term contract, but
the fact is that property prices in Cambridge haven't seen a down year in ages.
The worst they've done is to stay flat, and even that has been rare for more
than a few months. Cambridge is growing, and more and more people want to live
here. However, there's very little room to build new housing since most of the
green belt surrounding the city is sacrosanct (as it should be), and since the
Cambridge Planning Department seem loath to grant permission for development of
any structure taller than three storeys. One postdoc arrived in Cambridge in
June and within a few weeks exchanged contracts on a house at a price of
£145,000, then sold it for £176,000 at the end of his two-year tenure,
and since the house was the owner's primary place of residence, no capital gains
tax was payable. If you take in lodgers to fill your extra rooms, the rental
income may even pay your mortgage. (Letting rooms in Cambridge can be a lot of
work, though, since although the market is crowded with people who need housing,
the vast majority are short-term students, people coming from abroad, and so
forth. If you've several rooms to let, it's rare to go more than a few months
without a vacancy arising in one of them.) Even considering the fixed costs of
buying and selling, purchasing a house may turn out to be the best investment
decision you've ever made.
So, what are the costs of buying and selling? On the buying end, you can expect a valuation and survey fee of about £500 (you should, of course, get a full survey to avoid any nasty surprises), a conveyancing fee of about £600, a land registry fee of £200, local search fees of about £100, and depending on the type of mortgage that you obtain, perhaps a mortage application fee of about £200. You also pay stamp duty, which for a purchase price between £60,000 and £250,000 is 1%. On the selling end, you pay another conveyancing fee, and an estate agent's fee which typically is 1% + VAT (i.e. a total of 1.175%). (In Cambridge, I highly recommend Tylers estate agents. They're very good at advertising electronically as well as on paper, and they'll handle all the showings, unlike many estate agents who'll do nothing but advertise and collect offers whilst depending on you to stay home and show the house.)
If you're coming from abroad, you may have trouble qualifying for a mortgage from some lenders since their inflexible credit-scoring algorithms will rate anyone without a UK banking history a bad risk. Halifax are good at handling such exceptions, as long as you can show proof of regular income (e.g. an employment contract). If you have a bank account, you might also enquire with whatever bank holds your account. Mortgage brokers such as Charcol often aren't worth your trouble since they'll just send you to Halifax and then charge you a percentage of your mortgage loan.
Mortgages in the UK generally cover a term of 25 years, and unlike loans in some other countries the interest rate that you pay varies with the Bank of England's repo rate. Often you receive a discount on the repo rate for the first few years of the loan, after which time you pay slightly more than the repo rate. (The absence of fixed-rate loans makes house prices unstable as interest rates fluctuate, and particularly prone to crashes if interest rates increase so sharply that existing owners can no longer afford their mortgages and are forced to sell.) Loans can cover principal plus interest, or interest only. In the latter case, the entire amount of the principal becomes due at the end of the term or when the loan is paid off, and you must arrange a separate annuity to cover this lump payment. (I don't understand why people get interest-only mortgages; there seems no point to this separation of interest and principal.) Finally, one very useful type of loan is the flexible mortgage, in which the same financial institution holds both your current account and your mortgage, and the balance in your current account offsets the amount that you owe on the mortgage. Effectively, you receive the same interest rate on your savings as you're paying to the bank on the money that you've borrowed. You can still withdraw money from your current account; the only difference is that it whilst it's in the bank it offsets the balance of your mortgage loan and therefore reduces the amount of interest that you're paying.
Again if you're coming from abroad, you'll probably want to open a bank account, and perhaps acquire a credit card. One important reason to have a bank account is that salary cheques generally are `crossed', meaning that they bear the endorsement `account payee only' and therefore cannot be cashed but must be deposited to a bank account. These days, most people choose to be paid by electronic funds transfer rather than by cheque, but this method again requires the payee to hold a bank account. If you're used to the rampant sharing of financial information that takes place in the United States, you may be pleasantly surprised by the high level of privacy afforded by the Data Protection Act in the UK. It doesn't prevent a credit file being maintained on you, but it does ensure that the only private purpose for which this information can be used is the extension of credit by a financial institution. One difficulty that you may encounter is that you need proof of address in order to open a bank account, but in many cases you need to show proof of a bank account before anyone will let you a room! The way to get round this catch-22 is to have your employer write a letter of introduction to the bank, and then to give the bank your business address for correspondence. Barclays bank will accept such a letter of introduction, though since there's some very specific language that it must contain it's best to ask at the bank in advance.
WHERE TO EAT
Carlos's, on Mill Road in Petersfield, is hands-down the best kebab shop in
Cambridge. Some people like Gardie's (officially "The Gardenia") in Rose
Crescent just north of the market square, but I find their portions too small
and their prices too high. When you go to Carlos's you stand a good chance of
actually being served by Carlos, and if you go there with any regularity you'll
get to know him. This is important since if you're a regular he'll give you a
fried potato to munch as you wait for your food, and tell you all about the
old country (Turkey).
Absolutely the best Tandoori in Cambridge is Curry Queen, also on Mill Road. This is the only place I've seen in Cambridge where if you ask for your food really hot, you will in fact be served something that'll take the roof off your mouth.
A nice coffee shop is CB1, again on Mill Road. They have network, and games, and books, though as it's a small shopfront the selection of the latter is not large. CB1 hosts poetry readings on some Tuesdays, sometimes with poets visiting from London and elsewhere, sometimes with an open microphone. CB1's sister establishment, CB2, is on Norfolk Street just across East Road from the Grafton Centre and is a more upscale bistro. Unlike CB1, CB2 has main meals, and wireless.
If you spend any time in the centre of town during the evenings, you'll discover the two food vans that park in the market square from 7pm till the early morning hours. They're known colloquially as "the van of life" (on the north side of the square) and "the van of death" (on the south side). If you're in need of a grease fix, this is the place to get your burgers and chips.
Better and correspondingly more expensive food is on offer at my two favourite pubs, the Cambridge Blue in Gwydir Street, Petersfield, and the Free Press, in Prospect Row just north of Parker's Piece. If you want cheap pub food, you can go to the local JD Weatherspoon's pub, the Regal, on Saint Andrew's Street. The menu there is mass-produced but it's better quality than fast food and you can get a beer and a burger for £3.50 after 2pm. Avoid the Regal (and all other pubs near the city centre) on a Friday or Saturday night, though.
COMPUTING
If you're accustomed to the level of computing service and reliability of a good
university, at Cambridge you have a different thing coming. If a service goes
down or if hardware breaks after 5pm on a Friday, it won't be looked at till
9am Monday morning. There is something charming about this unhurried pace of
work — it's part and parcel with the offices being empty at evenings and
weekends and so forth — but on the other hand it can be terribly
frustrating when you're working towards a deadline.
As the university is charged per volume for JANET traffic across the Atlantic, many colleges and departments either pass these charges along to their administrative subunits or monitor network usage and flag anyone who's taking up a great deal of bandwidth. So there is always someone looking over your shoulder.
Storage of obscene material on any university computing system or transmission of obscene material via any university network is prohibited, so if you're into anything risqué you'd best keep it outside the university.
WHERE TO PARTY
Try KamBar, a small club on Wheeler Street behind the Corn Exchange. It's
actually a goth club, but if you're not a goth don't worry; people are friendly
and the music varies a lot. As a lot of the clientele are computer geeks, it
feels like familiar territory. Some people spend all evening in the bar
talking, and never go onto the dance floor. The cover is reasonable at £3.
THE COLLEGES
It's difficult to convey just how insular the Cambridge colleges are. Some,
such as Trinity, are loaded with money, whereas others are of more modest means.
One thing is certain, though: all of the money in Cambridge is held by the
colleges. The university itself has hardly any money, and consequently hardly
any power to dictate to the colleges. Each college is a community in itself,
with its own societies, its own library, its own rooms, its own meals. The
existence of these small communities within a large institution is a great
benefit if you happen to be a member of one of them. If you're on the outside,
though, you end up even more shut out of all the goings-on since so much
happens within the colleges and you have no entree. The colleges take all the
life out of Cambridge and sequester it within themselves. Although there are
university-wide societies, my experience with them has been that at the end of
the day everyone goes back to their respective colleges since that's where all
the facilities are.
When I was a member of a group evaluating the Cambridge college system for a report to MIT, we described two senses of a university community: community-in-the-large being the social and ideological glue that makes of an institution a university, and community-in-the-small being the diversity and individualism that sustain the university. Cambridge is richer in community than Britain's non-collegial universities in that the colleges sustain community-in-the-small; however, it's poorer than many North American universities in that it has very little community-in-the-large. Allegiances are to one's college, not to the university. There is very little in the way of a unified Cambridge experience beyond superficial shared experiences such as, say, punting on the Cam. The upshot of all this is that if you're a postdoc it's going to be difficult for you to have a life in Cambridge, but if you want to try, then you should try to become affiliated with a college since that's where all the life is.
If you're a student, whether undergraduate or postgraduate, good job as you're already a member of a college. If you're a member of a faculty, a college may approach you about becoming a fellow. For the rest of us — namely postdocs and other university staff — college membership often is out of reach. It isn't that any specific person or group is trying to exclude us, it's just that the creaky old bureaucracy of Cambridge seems to take about fifty years to adjust to any change, and postdocs have existed for about half that time. Though a few colleges have introduced schemes for postdoctoral membership, often they seem at a loss to find any practical way of including postdoctoral members, who invariably do not live in college accommodation. College membership then becomes merely nominal, and most of the social benefits fail to materialise.
In a few cases, postdoctoral scientists become college fellows. The most common way of attaching oneself to a college, though, is to supervise students at that college. In the ideal case, you supervise the same subject for a few terms, the college begins to become dependent on you for that subject, and you work your way in. Beware, though: if you care a lot about teaching, and especially if you're unfamiliar with Cambridge's exams and system of supervisions, you may find yourself investing so much time in your teaching that your other work begins to suffer. This is what happened to me when I supervised second-year medics at Churchill. They were doing part 1B of the Medical and Veterinary Sciences Tripos, and I was supervising their study of Neurobiology and Behaviour. Going into it I was excited about being able to teach students in such small groups, to interact with them and to let their questions and interests shape our discussions. The difficulty, as it turned out, was that their interests were all monotonously uniform: what did they need to know to answer the exam questions?
Of course, as the exam mark is the sole basis for a student's evaluation, it's natural that students will come to focus solely on the exam. Supervisors do assign weekly essays and submit reports to the college tutor at the end of every term, but in the end all that counts for the student's degree class, and for the college's standing in the league tables, is the exam result. Essays and shorter questions that supervisors set for their students are expected to be modelled on exam questions. Questions that demand delving beyond surface features or synthesising knowledge from various subtopics are spurned. I probably saw the worst of this tendency since I was teaching medics, and the beginning study of medicine involves a great deal of memorisation and attention to surface features. Perhaps this is why supervisors for medical subjects are in the greatest demand; nobody wants to put up with it. I did have a few students who were willing to ask deep questions and to integrate knowledge from diverse areas, but they were the exception. In any case, after one academic year of committing huge amounts of time for very little in the way of enjoyable teaching, I decided that forging a connection with a college wasn't worth the demands on my time and energy.
If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't try to use undergraduate teaching as a route of entry into a college, and I wouldn't focus on any college that caters primarily to undergraduates. There are three colleges limited to postgraduates and other mature students: Wolfson, Darwin, and Hughes Hall. [Addendum (September 2012): Clare Hall now have brought in a postdoctoral membership scheme.] Wolfson, in particular, has a more aggressive programme of postdoctoral membership than any other college, and once you've arrived at Cambridge as a postdoc you can ask your department head to recommend you for senior membership in Wolfson. I should have done this, rather than wasting my time on Churchill. Also, if you're less than thirty years old, look for these and other colleges' announcements of junior research fellowships. These fellowships cater primarily to people whose PhD's are from Cambridge or at least from British universities; many of us who've come from North American institutions are already over thirty by the time we've finished a PhD! Nevertheless, if you're eligible it doesn't hurt to apply. Fellowship terms commence at the start of the academic year in October, and applications are due the preceding January for some colleges and the preceding October for others. Though the stipendiary fellowships are in particular demand, there are also some non-stipendiary ones which will get you college affiliation if your salary is funded from other sources (e.g. your own grant).
You should also join the Philosophical Society as soon as you arrive at Cambridge. The only reason to do so is that once you've been a member for a year, you're eligible to apply for travel grants (deadlines 1 February, 1 May, 1 July, and 1 November). You'll need to find three members of the Society to recommend you for membership.
THE STUDENTS
You'll find that students at Cambridge are coddled. I mean, some of the
colleges actually employ bed-makers! The once-a-year timing of exams
encourages an atmosphere in which studies aren't taken seriously except for a
month or so during April and May. At MIT, people stay up till 3am working on
problem sets. At Cambridge, people stay up till 3am drinking. Many of these
people have never held a job; I actually once overheard one of them talking
about having to apply for a National Insurance number because he was about to
graduate. Most of them have never had to work for a living, and that's a shame,
because I believe strongly that when a student is invested in their education
they take it more seriously. Students here resented the change in 1997 that
abolished the maintenance grant and introduced a tuition fee of £1050 per
year for each of the three years, and they resent even more the prospect of a
system of top-up fees in which universities would charge market-rate tuition
fees — with grants available for the poorest students and with repayment
of all loans to be deferred till a graduate is earning at least £15,000
p.a. The hew and cry this year has been over increases in college room rents,
which have not been at market levels. I do think that students who enter
underpaid occupations should be given a break, but the fact is that many
Cambridge graduates enter highly paid professions such as finance, law, and
medicine.
Cambridge has been making a great effort to shed its upper-class image, at least as far as admissions are concerned, and to recruit students from state-supported schools. The colleges know that if they aren't progressive enough on this issue, they'll lose the college fee, the extra support from the government that makes possible this costly system of services that are replicated within each college. One might think that when a student arrives at Cambridge from a less privileged background, (s)he enriches the university with his or her unique experience and perspective. In some cases this happens, and one has only to look at the student leaders to see the benefits. In too many cases, though, students entering from lower-class backgrounds simply buy into the class system, forget where they came from, and emerge three years later to run off to a job in the City.
The government seems to want to address this class distinction by sending everyone to university. But the fact is that there are many professions that are useful and deserving of respect that don't require a university style of education. The solution to the problem of inequality isn't making up a degree course for every horse trainer or automobile mechanic. The solution, rather, is to eliminate the perception engrained in British society that those with degrees are somehow better than those without. The existing system at Cambrige and other Russell Group universities instead perpetuates this irrational valuation of the university degree as something that everyone must have.
Another aspect of the class distinction so subtly engrained in Cambridge is the attitude towards manual work — an attitude that's important at a university that prides itself on science and engineering. Ask a student to construct a design, and (s)he'll happily go off and return with a sheaf of drawings. Ask that student then to go into the workshop and build the device that (s)he's just designed, and (s)he may protest, "but I'm training to be a manager." This division between the engineers who design products and the workers who build them is in large measure what's responsible for the shoddy state of British engineering in comparison with its international competitors. It's a shame.
You'll find in Cambridge that even the new PhD's behave a lot like undergraduates. This is because most of them have come straight into their three-year PhD programmes after finishing an undergraduate course, and consequently have had little or no experience of the real world. Government support for doctoral studies is limited to three years, and as a result the system is structured so that everyone finishes in three years. (Increasingly, some students are taking four years, but the extra year of residency often is available with concessions on fees.) There is, of course, a limit to the amount that can be learnt in only three years. In other countries, a student in postgraduate education is expected to take some time settling on a research project — one that furthers the research interests of the supervisor but is fundamentally the student's own creation. In Britain, the rushed pace of postgraduate education leaves no time for such casting about, and entering students often are handed a project by a supervisor. As a result, a student passing a PhD viva finishes with very little idea of how to conduct independent research. I'm all for time limits on doctoral degrees, I mean I'm the guy who ended up taking nine years, but the time to degree in the UK is so brief that the quality of the skills learnt suffers.
IN CLOSING
Fundamentally, what you accomplish at Cambridge is not so much a question of
what you're able to do as it is a question of where you've been and whom you
know. It really is all about schmoozing — so start practising how to
drink your port wine!