Feature: Two Alumnae Reports from Cambridge University
Camillia Smith of East Lansing and Robin Stein of North Hollywood, CA, both 2002 MSU graduates and members of MSU’s Honors College, won top graduate fellowship awards as well as prestigious scholarships to study at Cambridge University, England.
Smith, who obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MSU’s Lyman Briggs School, received a Churchill Scholarship, a National Science Foundation (NSF) 2002 Graduate Research Fellowship and a National Physical Science Consortium Graduate Fellowship. Stein, who received her degree in chemistry from the College of Natural Science, was the first MSU student to be named a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She also received an NSF 2002 Graduate Research Fellowship. Both students also pursued interdisciplinary studies in MSU’s College of Arts & Letters.
In the essays that follow, these two exceptional students share with us their first year’s experience at Cambridge. Of particular interest are the ways these two products of America’s premier land-grant universities were able to adapt to and thrive at one of the world’s elite universities. –Editor.
GENITIVE ABSOLUTES, OPTATIVES AND OTHER ABSTRUSITIES
By: Camillia Smith
"Yes, just like the river," I found myself confirming, quite frequently, on introduction to new acquaintances amused or curious about the spelling of my name. It was joked that I was fated to "come up" to Cambridge, and had some mysterious connection with my namesake, the river Cam.
Certainly the none-so-clean but majestic and history-laden watercourse held some sort of fascination for me. When one my first memories of my arrival last autumn at England's second-oldest university, is straining my eyes out the cab window into the late evening darkness in order to catch a sight of Magdalene Bridge and the depths below it, whilst being whizzed onward from the train station to what would be my new home, for the next several months: Churchill College.
Churchill was founded and built in the early 1960s in honor of good old Sir Winston, and so is rather more modern than the early colleges built up along the river, in the medieval town that derived its name and initial importance from the said body of water. Since at least AD 875, bridges have existed at the site of the original Roman crossing near the base of Castle Hill where Magdalene (pronounced "maudlin") Bridge stands today.
The town was a thriving trade center by the thirteenth century, when scholars arrived from Oxford, fleeing hostilities there to set up their own institution of learning on the banks of the Cam. As Oxford was itself an offshoot--started in the preceding half-century by banished and dissatisfied English scholars returning from the University of Paris—it is said that the third time worked the charm. The founders of Cambridge University finally got things right.
In contrast to the stately row of College gates, chapels, and vintage University buildings along Kings Parade and Trinity Lane, or to the gracious riverside lawns—“the Backs"—of the older and richer Colleges, Churchill appears unimpressive and functional, something I had been taught to expect by the photographs, and could only just make out, anyway, in the dark on that first evening.
There is something to be said, however, for the contiguity of the College grounds and playing fields, as well as the undisturbed peace of its setting. No tourists here—and no need to cross town to find a lawn on which you can play, let alone walk!.
On arrival, I entered the Porter's Lodge to sign in and obtain my key and ask directions to my room. I had opted not to live in the "Staircases"—also called "Halls"—which were mostly inhabited by undergraduates. Instead the College gave me accommodation in one of its "Hostels"—large private houses turned into mini-dormitories.
Whittingehame Lodge, which I would call home for the next several months, was a late nineteenth-century domicile, once the residence of successive dons holding a certain chaired University professorship and now the closely-quarted living space of 14 Churchillian postgraduates.
How mixed were my first impressions of Whittingehame! When, after much coaxing, I finally managed to turn the key in my door, I was pleasantly surprised by the spaciousness and character of what greeted me. I had been led to expect that my "bed-sit"—combined bedroom and sitting room—would have about the size and feel of a largish closet, but thankfully I had been wrong, and once I figured out how to work the radiator (some days later), my roomy L-shaped bed-sit, endowed with two sets of tall windows, became quite comfortable. Yet, on my first explorations of the rest of the house, I found no sign of either a working phone or a shower, amenities it hadn't even occurred to me I'd have to go without. I went to bed that night a bit bewildered. (Only later did I discover the hidden door to the Hostel shower, and also that any who wanted phones had to supply and connect their own.)
In the Cambridge system, every student must be a member of one of the thirty-some Colleges that make up the University (really a federation of semi-autonomous States not unlike the European Union). Each incoming student is assigned a College Tutor, who is responsible for his or her personal and academic well-being. The first two words of advice I received from my own tutor were, "Don't row."
I had absolutely no intention of heeding this excellent counsel, however, and so shortly afterwards found myself awakening before dawn to cycle a couple of miles to the boathouse and spend chilly mornings in a heavy wooden Eight learning how to handle an oar with the Churchill Women's Novice Crew. I'd never tried rowing before but I arrived with a keen desire to have a go at it; I simply had the sense that it was the thing to do, and that I I couldn't leave without having made an honest attempt at learning. This determination got me through the unpleasant and even painful outings in the Michaelmas Ladies Novice Crew, the frozen but more productive ones of Lent Term, and the exam-period training of Easter.
The reward for sticking things out to the end came in the form of “May Bumps”—a series of intercollegiate races held over four days where Eight boats from each College in a division start simultaneously but a boat-and-a-half length apart, the object being to bump the bow of one's boat into the boat ahead before the boat chasing you achieves the same. Boats bumped and bumping switch places and carry on the race the next day.
In the Mays, we of the Churchill Ladies Second Boat felt strong, coordinated, and confident. This feeling justified itself in our success: We went up three places, and only just missed getting “blades” (a coveted symbol of success) on a technical row-over we had due to the absence of a crew meant to start two places ahead. It wasn't merely success that made everything seem worthwhile, however—although that definitely helped—but rather the experience itself of countless hours spent in a boat with both grads and undergrads, British and non-British, and working, suffering, and eventually winning together.
As for most postgraduates, our local MCR (“Middle Common Room”) provided the beginnings of my College social life. “Fresher's Week” was a lot of fun, and I'll always have fond memories of ordering in my first Cambridge curry, en masse from a takeout service, and of playing Twister at the traditional Hostel Crawl. When I had nothing else to do, there was always 'Superhall'—a formal sit-down dinner given by the College every Friday in term, where the food manages to be just slightly better than average and the undergrads, somewhat more drunk—and occasionally other special College dinners, including the Founder's and June Feasts. Somehow I ended up at the “High Table” at each of the important dinners, which was exciting because I had a better chance to meet the invited VIPs this way (although the table itself is notoriously wide and difficult to hear conversation across, and so one inevitably spends most of the time speaking to neighbours on the same side). Early on I noted the importance that Cambridge tradition attached to “Hall”—when the MCR Committee elections came round I stepped in as one of the External Events Officers.
Having thus become responsible for organizing exchange formal halls with other College MCRs and BA Societies, I decided to take up the “sport” of intercollegiate dining. The object was to see how many of the colleges one could dine at. I myself ended up with something of a scorecard: Christs, Clare, Corpus Christi, Downing, Emmanuel, Fitzwilliam, Girton, Gonville & Caius, Kings, Magdelene, Pembroke, Peterhouse, Queens, St Catherines, St Johns, Selwyn, Sidney Sussex, Trinity, Trinity Hall, Wolfson, and Churchill's sister college at Oxford (also named Trinity).
Trinity, Oxford, had by far the best cuisine, outshining even Trinity, Cambridge's Annual Math Society Dinner (a sumptuous affair given in the Master's Lodge of that College), and certainly Churchill's best attempts. I found a Greek class taught in the Faculty of Classics a special treat: small, stimulating, diversely populated by keenly interested students, and taught by a Corpus Fellow whose wry but good-natured British humour and wealth of historical and etymological anecdotes seasoned our study of aorist participles, genitive absolutes, optatives and other such abstrusities.
The mathematics community there did generally seem to have greater collective interest in mathematical history—perhaps because people there are closer and more attached to it, having more to gain by preserving and transmitting such history than most of their American counterparts. It appeared natural, therefore, that there should be such large following amongst veteran Cantabrigians (undergrads, mostly) for the (non-examinable) history of maths lectures given by the notorious P. Bursill-Hall, whose irreverent view of historiography combined with a cynical sense of humour and a taste for command performance made this one-man show engagingly addictive.
One of my absolute favorite lecture experiences was attending a talk very early in the year by Quentin Blake, the children's book illustrator. Another memorable one was hearing Stephen Hawking give his opinion on 'Cosmology from the Top Down' and explain his own cosmological approach in person to an enthusiastic audience in an overfilled auditorium at the CMS.
During term time, not many of my evenings, it seemed, were spent quietly studying in College; when not engaged elsewhere I found myself basking in the wealth of Cambridge's theatre scene. The quality as well as the quantity of student productions delighted me, and it was also good fun to search out the variety of dramatic venues, scattered amongst the Colleges and elsewhere. My favourites straddled the bulk of my stay, however; I liked best a production of Sondheim's Into the Woods at the ADC during the Michaelmas term, and one of A Mid-Summer Night's Dream in the Peterhouse Fellows' Garden during May week. And, as if seeing these great theatricals wasn't enough, I determined to be in one—something I'd never ventured to do previously (due in part to lack of opportunity, but more largely to lack of courage). So I got myself into the chorus of the Gilbert & Sullivan Society's Michaelmas term Mikado, and happily donned white face make-up and an imitation kimono to chirp 'Braid the Raven Hair' et cetera as a pseudo-Japanese maiden. We played two nights only, but both times to a packed and responsive audience. The experience was thrilling, and proved well worth the stress involved in never knowing from day to day when, where, or how long our next rehearsal would be (apparently standard practice in Cambridge student theatre). I was amazed at how everything pulled together so well while being entirely student-run. Moreover, the camaraderie we developed in the course of an intense three weeks of rehearsals lasted throughout the rest of the year.
We were still having Mikado cast reunions in June! Following my G&S debut, I became quite fond of attending the Society's regular “singthroughs,” and managed to make it through 22 and a half hours of its annual 24-hour G&S Singathon. Tuesday evenings (usually) found me making my way, violin in hand, to the Faculty of Music at West Road for rehearsals of the Cambridge University Musical Society orchestra that I had somehow managed to audition myself into during Fresher's week. The standard of performance was very high, and I found myself refreshed by the challenge—as well as amused by the different musical vocabulary used by the Brits. I spent a rehearsal or two wonderingly guessing at what was meant by the terms 'quaver', 'crotchet', and so forth before I had to ask my desk partner to explain them to me. We only did a concert per term, but that was sufficient work, as we only met to rehearse once a week. The first concert was scheduled for Thanksgiving—so unfortunately I had to run off from the reception and dinner given by Sir Boyd for the Americans at Churchill with only a bite of the yams, the hospitable Master commending me on my musical commitment but insisting that I must take something before escaping.
FROM FRESHER’S WEEK TO TEA TIME & PUB CRAWLS
By Robin Stein
I have been a student at Cambridge University for ten months or so now, and there are still things I don't understand about it. There seem to be several sets of black gowns around, like those worn in Harry Potter, floating around, and I do not know which are to be worn when. I received only about four days notice before I had to move into my housing for this year, and I do not know whether I have signed a contract or am just expected to pay rent. And I have no idea when my grant check arrives, only that when I go to pay my bill, it tends to be sitting on the bursar's desk.
There are many things I have figured out, however: There is no need to worry about completing requirements or submitting forms on time; if the university administration needs something from me, I will be told, at the administration's convenience, and eventually everything will be done. I have realized that my funding body, while generous, is disorganized, and it tends to provide rather more alcohol than food at its events. In general, I have learned over the past year that if the price of living in Cambridge is having to accept the pace of life as it is dictated by people around me, it is worth the cost.
Although I was confused when I arrived here at first, I have come to enjoy living in Cambridge very much. I saw Churchill College for the first time in mid-September, 2002, and was disappointed, because although it was going to be my home for the foreseeable future, it was a dull brown brick color and had been built in the 1960s, having none of the romance medieval Cambridge is supposed to have. Colleges in Cambridge are like Holmes Hall at MSU, but they have even less of a connection to the central university administration than that living-learning environment has, and they tend to divide themselves from the city around them with thick hedges or walls.
Undergraduates live in College and have their two or three-on-one tutorial sessions (given in place of recitation sections at MSU) in College; they eat in College, and play on sports teams in College. They use the College libraries, at least for their first two or three years, and they attend College student government meetings.
Science postgraduates (as they are called here) like myself do have to leave College to get to work, but I still live in College and sometimes eat there. Next year I hope to teach students living there, and the vast majority of my friends in Cambridge are those I have met in College. Thought I didn't know quite how important College would become to me when I arrived at Churchill, I did know that I would be living in it, and I wished that it were prettier. I soon met other grad students, however, and realized that living in sordid surroundings does not make for an unpleasant social life.
Our first week, “Freshers' Week,” convinced us of that. Each evening during this week, new students of Churchill beginning graduate degrees at Cambridge University were shown how to have a good time in Cambridge. One night we had a hostel crawl, where we were taken from one College-owned house to another and made to play silly games such as bobbing for apples or Twister. Another night was a pub crawl. We went from pub to pub trying to solve a different word puzzle at each pub and became slightly more inebriated with each game. One morning our tutors, the equivalent for Cambridge graduate students of MSU's undergraduate advisors, took us for a boat ride on the River Cam. People were amazingly silly, and amazingly friendly. Many of them were from overseas, the largest proportion of them being American, but many of them came from Continental Europe, Asia, or even Africa.
I noticed the European students in particular, because at home I had met very few people who had grown up in Europe, despite being from Los Angeles, an extremely multinational city, and I had tended mentally to lump all people of European descent together as sharing the same basic culture. At Churchill I realized that blonde Scandinavians and dark Italians did not have a common culture, and that both their cultures were different from that of England. But all of us could have a good time together, and we certainly did last October.
Since then, of course, we've broken into smaller groups, and pub crawls are more likely to include 10 students than 50. One of the major groups has been the Americans staying at Churchill for one year only, the length of time required to obtain a research master's degree here. Most of them are going on to graduate school or medical school in the U.S. next year. This group tends to hang out in the bar a lot (Churchill has two bars, the smaller one of which is in the graduate student common room and is run by and for grad students). Many of them are very active socially. They have introduced some of the British students and our South African bar manager to American drinking games and to serious poker, but at the same time, some people felt that the common room was too American-dominated. I know most everyone in this group, but the Americans I spent most time with, before they finished their one-year courses, were Cammie and a friend of mine from high school who had the same scholarship as Cammie and as a result was studying at Churchill for one year, and neither of them tended to spend evenings in the bar. The closest friends I've made since I got here are my upstairs neighbors, one Irish and one English. My Irish friend is Catholic and his parents are farmers, and he has a very nice accent. My English friend is an amazingly sporty woman with whom I once cooked more than one hundred gingerbread cookies from her mother's recipe, in preparation for the Churchill postgraduate Christmas party. The three of us are moving into the same house next year.
Despite the sheer fun of making friends and playing crazy games in people's backyards (or gardens, as they say here), academics were also important during the first weeks at Cambridge, and, of course, subsequently. I hadn't been given a date to start on or information about any sort of orientation, but I did have the name of my mentor, or supervisor, and an address for the chemistry department from a published paper of hers. I found her office in the department with a bit of luck, and knocked on her door. It turned out to be tea time, so I had my first cup of tea in England with my supervisor and lab. I think that having tea twice during the workday, at around 10:30 and around 3:30, just about sums up the difference between American chemistry labs (at least those I've seen) and Cambridge. The tea room provides a social and intellectual meeting place for each group in the department, and is one of the few locations where informal meetings between students and heads of different research groups can interact. My own group tends to walk to tea together every morning and afternoon behind our supervisor, who normally pays for all of our drinks (the princely sum of 15p (about a quarter) for tea and 25p, or forty cents, for coffee). Each British person adds milk to their tea, and then we discuss our research, or my supervisor's horses, or upcoming conferences, or the party one of us has been to the night before, or the state of the NMR machine which is the sole source of the research data for each of us. If a visiting lecturer has been invited to Cambridge by our supervisor, he or she will accompany us, or if any of a couple other lecturers in the department happens to be in the tearoom, we sit with them, and we are often treated to an intellectual discussion that frequently continues back in our office after we have finished our drinks. Taking breaks each morning and afternoon is relaxing, but it is often stimulating, and not just because of the caffeine in the tea.
I had to decide in the middle of the year whether I was going to remain at Cambridge until I completed my Ph.D., or whether I would return to the States after one year in England. I have decided to stay, for several reasons: I've come to enjoy my project and want to discover a solution to the problem I am defined, I've made some very good friends, and I just enjoy being in England.
Every morning on my way in to work I cross over the river and watch the moorhens and ducks, then pass by a few old and beautiful colleges. At least once a week during term time I have the option of dressing up for a three- or four-course meal with wine, served by waiters in our college, and sitting near people wearing gowns. And I usually drink tea twice a day with my lab. Quite how my department, college, and funding are administered remains a mystery to me, but when I am in such congenial surroundings and have met so many nice people, it is easy to concentrate on my work and enjoy life in Cambridge.