So you’re a fresher starting the engineering course at Cambridge. Here are some Do’s and Don’ts for your first year. I cannot lie, it isn’t going to be the easiest thing in the world but if you follow this advice you might even have some fun along the way.
Good luck, you’re going to need it.
DO:
Work with other people. Your fellow engineers are not your competition, they are a valuable resource. Whether it is examples papers or coursework or missing something in lectures, take advantage of your friends, college and year group chats.
DON’T:
Be intimidated by the year group engineering chat. Some people like to talk a lot on there. You don’t have to listen to them.
DO:
Join a society. You will meet new people from other colleges and hopefully learn something along the way. Plus when it comes to applying for internships, having something to put on your CV other than turning up hungover to labs and barely understanding lectures will come in handy.
DON’T:
Be late for labs. Most of them are standard credit (as is coursework) so you don’t need to stress about doing them to an amazing standard, but turning up late can often dock you some marks (depending on how strict the demonstrator is).
DO:
Make use of the help sessions. Friendliness may vary but in general the help available for coursework is pretty good, providing you haven’t left it to the night before to ask what Python is. Which leads to…
DON’T:
Leave your coursework to the last minute. This is a suggestion that many people (including me at times) ignore. But it really is a bad plan to view the final deadline as a starting target. Plus, if you go to early markups you can feel really, really smug (for about 5 minutes until the next piece of coursework kicks your ass).
DO:
Make use of all that the department has to offer. Whether that is free tea and coffee in the canteen, free language courses or the facilities in the Dyson Centre. Your friends in other subjects will be jealous when they find out everything available for free to engineers.
DON’T:
Use cribs all the time. It will make your life very difficult when it comes to exams.
DO:
Use cribs some of the time. Don’t be a martyr, there’s no point being stuck forever and ever.
DON’T:
Stay quiet in supervisions. Yes your supo partner may have done the whole term’s work in Week 1 and be interning at NASA, but at the end of the day this is your degree and you’ll get nothing out of supervisions if you’re so afraid to look stupid that you don’t ask anything. And who knows, maybe everyone else was also stuck on the same thing.
So that’s it, all the most important Do’s and Don’ts of First Year Engineering at Cambridge. In your first few weeks everyone will want to throw advice at you, just like this article does. But soon enough, you’ll be finding your feet. Good luck!
By Kate Lucas