Cambridge Degrees

[Hawkins0001]

For anyone that has knowledge or has studied at Cambridge, How accurate is this perspective:

"#Camfession36372

As a second-year mathmo who has consistently done well throughout the past two years (predicted firsts in every single course, never late for lectures or example sheet submissions, revised courses thoroughly and did more years of past papers than the guideline recommends…), I feel that every paper I sit this term is telling me that for this course, hard work simply doesn’t pay off. Yes you need to work 50+ hrs weekly to even have a chance of scraping 2.1 (many people above median ranking last year got less than 65% on transcript, for example, which is unfair compared to some other courses) yet the exam questions won’t even ask any bookwork without a twist incorporating some ingenious trick that you need to pull out of thin air (I am not talking about STEP-style tricks, I am talking about multi-step, algebraically messy and strategically olympiad-style tricks that aren’t even given hints about). I came here to try to become the best mathematician I can be, but this course proves to be nothing but an ego-deflating, despair-inducing feast of condensed miseries glorified in the name of intellectual training. They will never acknowledge the fact the most of us in the cohort are simply unsuitable for the course and exams they have designed, and because we are no senior wranglers or potential field medallists, the sacrifice of our mental health is perfectly justified in the grand scheme of pursuing so called academic rigour. I loved and loved and loved maths. Now I just want to run away from it and learn how to feel (if only occasionally) happy again."

Should have gone to Oxford - I knew no one who slogged away like that, genuinely no one.

Got a 2.1 in a humanities, knew a lot of mathmos. You won't get a first through hard work. Especially not in maths. The super hard questions are (in my understanding... I think someone told me.... After a load of college port) designed to be stretch the undergrads really far because you have some kind of maths genius hormonal rush that's done by your mid 20s (think how young Newton was when he was doing a lot of incredible work) and they want to spot who's got it, then and there. Yeah there can only be one senior wrangler but they need to make it hard for them 😜

Do some extra curricular stuff and get a 2.1! It's the best way. A friend who did English said one of the options for the final essay was "Tragedy: when the feeling's gone and you can't go on. Discuss"

But yeah sorry hard work doesn't equal a first, unlike the previous 18 years 😜

I got a high first in Engineering at Cambridge 25 years ago.

I think what I did 'right' as an undergrad was

• 'work' was my main 'thing' - I did plenty of extra-curricular, drinking, fun etc but I didn't have something (sport, hobby, boyfriend) that ranked above 'work'. This partly happenchance, partly because I genuinely really enjoyed my subject
• I played to my strengths in course choices for 3rd & 4th year (as many posters above describe)
• I worked roughly 9-6 most days (including lectures etc in this) and mostly did not work evenings. I think I did a bit less at weekends. So it was full time but did not feel horrific. (I had a year out working full time in engineering before I went, I guess I just treated it like a full time job) It was/is way more work than you hear described at other unis.
• I attempted to keep up with supervision work during term (hard work!) - and crucially made myself catch up in holidays. Second year maths was my 'hardest' subject, and for that I did additional holiday prep. Feeling that I knew how to try to get on top of things also gave me an element of feeling in control?
• I was friends with some people a year or two above me who were good at maths - a few times they showed me stuff on back of envelope over a pint that really helped! I was also friends with the other engineers in college who were good at the subject and we would sometimes work together. Thus I had informal channels to help when stuck.

I wasnt aiming for a first before I started (hadn't really thought about it, and I didn't have a life plan in academia). I think I took the second route that College Dad described above (which is good advice) and then was also lucky because one of the hobbies I chose was my work?

I did cry in a Thermodynamics supervision. And despite my degree, still think that magnets roughly work by magic, I have never properly understood them :-)

Having written all that, it's probably not applicable to maths which sound like it might just require genius 😀

I have also read that Maths ability peaks very young, maybe they are looking to find that as fast as possible.

I had this as a final essay question one year:

“Malthus was right after all. Discuss.”

I laughed out loud in the exam hall. Got a first on that paper, mind.

A friend of mine studying English had his department arguing over whether one of his first year final essays deserved a first or a third. One examiner though it was genius, one thought it was garbage.

That’s probably why it’s best not to lose your mind over it. I didn’t feel the slightest bit competitive while I was there. For me it was enough to have got there at all, I didn’t feel I needed to be the best among geniuses. That way lies madness.

This is the same for every university in a humanities subject, as long as you make a decent argument and evidence it they can't mark you down. You can't be 'wromg'.
STEM is different,.if you don't know where to start you don't know.

Calling it “gimmicks” is very immature. “Challenging questions”? “Questions which test deeper understanding and not bookwork”?

In the real world, doing maths or STEM is not about repeating what was already in the textbook, but using the knowledge to solve new problems.

I kind of agree.

It is in some way similar to this years GCSE students complaining about the octagon question (which contained no maths skills above a grade 5) or the 'Hannah's Sweets' question in 2015 which just combined the two topics of probability and algebra into the same question.

Sure, but he was talking about the workload. In my subject there were 40 hours per week of scheduled lectures and supervisions, on top of which we were expected to study and write around two essays a week.

I could easily have spent all my time on academic work if I’d been of that mindset.

Hi, just realised I phrased the last sentence of my post terribly 🙈 I mean, hard work doesn't equal a first like the previous 18 years of life, not the previous 18 years of Cambridge. You can do GCSEs and A levels and get amazing results then go to Oxbridge (my DH went to the other place, fair play to him) and then it's really hard!!! Hang in there 😜

@EatYourVegetables @TeenDivided

I did say ‘for lack of a better word’ bur anyone in maths knows there are questions requiring deep insight and questions requiring computational tricks. As your knowledge develops you can replace the latter with the former. The word ‘gimmicky’ when things skew too far to the tricks is one I picked up from DH and his pals — RG maths professors and journal editors who use the word about research papers that are more about tricks than insight.

My l PhD is in a maths-intensive STEM field and some of my research is in mathematics journals. Why people should have jumped to compare a short passage about DH’s initial difficulty adjusting to Cambridge maths (culminating in great success) with GCSE maths, and whether he or I was meant to look ignorant, I have no idea.

Whoever it was who struggled with first year physics at Cam.
They had to completely rewrite the first year physics course about 10-15 years ago as it was just too hard for school leavers.
In the 90s I had 4 school friends who were top of the class for a level physics. They all went on to do NatSci and pretty much crashed and burned, came out with 2:2s. Weren't allowed to change course as their grades weren't good enough, paradoxically....

I supervised some of the NatSci first years in my college who were going on to do physics and found they were not enjoying the maths courses at all. I did manage to get them back on track, at least well enough to get decent marks in the exams. It sounded like the lectures were the issue, assuming knowledge that many of them didn't have from A level.

There is huge variation in what students have learned before they arrive. I met some mathmos at Trinity who would have got a solid mark in their first year exams before we'd been to a single lecture.

I studied a humanities subject at Cambridge but recognise some of this from the mathematicians I knew. I think it’s a subject where some people just hit a ceiling and can’t do anymore. There were some real maths prodigies who had been at A level standard at around 11 etc. A mathematician described one paper to me where you got double marks for a complete solution and marks deducted for attempting something and getting it wrong so if you took a risk and did a full answer to something difficult you could do spectacularly well but you could also crash and burn by being too ambitious in what you attempted.

Most Cambridge students go in thinking they’re quite bright and end up feeling decidedly average though.

Even in humanities I had some “impossible” exams. I had a paper where we had to translate a poem which hadn’t been translated before because some of the vocabulary only occurred in that one poem plus some of the poem had been lost so there were gaps. That’s the sort of “trick” which Cambridge like. It is a way of separating the bright and well prepared from the exceptional though. I also had a paper where we were given some commentary in German to respond to despite German not being part of the course (just assumed you should be able to read in German).

This is good to know! I did NatSci ~20 years ago. I went intending to do Physics, but actually Maths and Physics were the hardest subjects in my first year (I had only done one Maths A Level) and I went on to ultimately specialise in Chemistry and came out with a high 1st.

I think what you take from the experience does depend on your personality. It certainly makes you resilient. The pace is fast, and you are given difficult problem sets to do each week which require you to really understand the material you have just learnt in the lectures. We would pour over these problem sets every week, and still only manage to complete 40% of it. However, if you are willing to push yourself and relish the challenge then it is a really amazing feeling when (towards the end of the term/year) you start to master the concepts. I loved the course and it's one of the best experiences I have had in my life.

My brother did Advanced Computer Science at Cambridge and finished with a First. I don't think he found it as intense as that post describes. But it was a different course to Maths and my brother is a very laid-back person who doesn't get stressed easily and is also super smart.

I went to the other place and got the top first in a humanity. I did very little work even in my final year.

What I would say though is that everyone who gets in to O&C is bright and most are amongst the brightest in their year at school. The problem is that a 3Astar pupil is pretty normal at O&C and that is a huge culture shock for many. There was one boy in my year & subject who was the first person in his school to ever get in and had clearly been treated as some sort of living god for managing it. But he was as average as they came when he got there and despite working his socks off only got a middling 2:1

So in essence it seems at times there is a preconceived perspective of what they would already know, vs what they were actually taught depending on the educational institution etc?

That was impression from whenever someone in another subject asked me to help them with a maths problem.

An engineer in the year below me once asked how to do an integral, which needed a simple trig substitution. I couldn't get my head round how someone had done at least A level maths and not been shown that, genuinely thought they were joking with me at first. It's the kind of trick you either know or you don't, trying substitutions and seeing a solution neatly fall out is not something I expect many students just figure out without being shown a few common ones to try.

I've seen some very strong mathematicians struggle to keep pace when they move to a new school/college/uni and there's no awareness of the gaps in their knowledge. This is one of the major ways people come unstuck with maths in my view, figuring out where the holes are and filling them in. There are plenty of students who crash and burn when they try to do further maths, especially if they have come from another school where the GCSE teaching was not as strong as their new peers got.

I do think a lot of people doing maths at uni will eventually find themselves bumping up against limits to their understanding, it's possible to get a first at Cambridge even though plenty of courses were a total mystery to you.

Would people be better equipped for Cambridge If they already had an excellent grasp of the various subject first?

Cart before the horse, OP? It is very difficult to learn maths to Cambridge standard on your own

Would people be better equipped for Cambridge If they already had an excellent grasp of the various subject first?

That is just not how maths works.

TBH that sounds like a student grappling with not being top of the class anymore.

I might have said the same about my Further Maths A level. Maths A Level - a doddle. Further Maths - might as well have been written in hieroglyphs for all I understood it. And yet one girl in the class could mysteriously answer everything correctly, and yes she did go on to Cambridge.

Some people at any university are going to work their arses off and still get a 2.1.

Some people at any university are going to work their arses off and still get a 2.1.

Isn't the point that getting a first is meant to be an indication of ability well above the norm - so most people couldn't get one even if they did work really hard. It ought to be possible for most to get a 2:1 with hard work but a first should demonstrate an aptitude for the subject above and beyond the slog? SO the undergrad cited in the OP presumable just doesn't have that flair for the subject so a 2:1 is essentially his threshold?

Yes - with the caveat that he almost certainly could have got a First for maths at most other unis.