Back In Cambridge

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First off, I meant to post this earlier, but I got caught up reading The Cambridge Student and Varsity, which are the two Cambridge student newspapers. They both have articles about how the Cambridge Vice Chancellor commented on government meddling in the university application process. She said something along the lines about universities ‘are not engines for promoting social justice’. And she is quite right, except a lot of people have taken this way out of context and perceived it as if she said ‘It is not our place to help the poor’.

Varsity mentioned an article in the Guardian by this woman called Barbara Ellen and she basically said that Oxbridge should be ashamed for being such elitist institutions with no intentions of being accessible for people with less privileged backgrounds. Then she touted the significant difference in ratios of state and private school students in the UK and in Cambridge. And for this article I would say (like what my former AC chemistry teacher used to say): What a load of rubbish! I got angry just by reading it. What Allison Richards, the Vice Chancellor means to say is that students are accepted because of merit, regardless of social backgrounds. The purpose of Oxbridge is to teach the brightest students, it is one of the best universities in the world and it should not be dumbed down just so that the student population become proportionally representative of the outside world. There's no need for positive discrimination.

What grates me even more is that this idiotic piece of article seems to convey the message that Oxbridge is only for the socially privileged. Far from it. My coursemate was the Access Officer in Trinity and you wouldn’t believe the amounts of events they organised to let state school students know how Cambridge is like and how it is not really that daunting. I’ve also read enough stories about teachers, not knowing anything about Cambridge, discouraged their students from applying. To quote something I read from one of the student papers last academic year, ‘We can’t accept you if you don’t apply.’

So there you go. I don’t know why I get all pumped up, I’m not even British! And I’m usually pretty apathetic with these kinds of things (yes Casper, I still don’t know what the symbols of UK political parties are, maybe they should advertise it more?). I guess I’m in a socio-political awareness mode tonight.

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Right, so I’m now back in Cambridge (and so is everybody else apparently, including the freshers) after two days in Norwich in which I visited Casper, my former roommate in AC. It was a good trip, I got to see the (small-ish) city of Norwich and the University of East Anglia, which is probably the second UK university that I visited after Imperial, not counting open days and interviews of course. Gosh, I really should get out more.

Unfortunately I didn’t take that many pictures, so here’s some of the Cow Tower and the Norwich Castle.

I bought the Cambridge Reporter Class List today. It’s basically a booklet with names of students and what grades they got for the previous examination. It has the names and grades of all the students in all the subjects, except those who fail. I bought this every year because it’s nice to see my name in print with my exam grade. However, as you may know, last year was a big disappointment, so it hurt a bit to buy the booklet today. Oh well, I’ll be fine, plus it’s ridiculous not to buy it since I’ve already bought the booklet for the past two years already.

And, I think I haven’t mentioned it already so... Eid Mubarak!

Yaz.

P.S. Yeah, I know, I just finished learning LaTeX.