QC

i went to MIT and studied abroad at cambridge for a year and the biggest cultural difference was that at MIT people competed to signal that they were working as hard as possible - "i stayed up until 3am" etc. - and at cambridge people competed to signal that they did not workhttps://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1186084266553143297 …

the ideal at cambridge was to look like you spent 0% of your time studying and 100% of your time drinking but still make it through school somehow. i really did not expect this. felt like a natural aristocracy thing, like signaling being a better kind of human

Guilty as charged, though sports (especially rowing, no matter how incompetently) and drama were also considered acceptable alternatives to excessive drinking, and cheaper on a student budget.

heh. i was briefly on the christ's college frisbee team and they told stories about drinking so much the night before a game that they needed to occasionally go into the bushes to puke + also still win

I was at Sidney Sussex 1979-82, so a lot may have changed. It seemed to be considered just fine to do enough work for a solid 2nd, together with a lot of non-academic activities. And you'd hear "can't come out tonight, I've got an essay crisis" quite often.

In some ways having some truly brilliant people around gives the fairly-bright people a bit more freedom to kick back and not be excessively competitive about positions in the middle of the pack.

Oh, it's +1 for spending time on an obscure sport, so frisbee, croquet, badminton, lacrosse would all be noble alternatives to being in the library. Hope you enjoyed May Week ? (for non-Cantabrigians, it's a fortnight in June full of parties and theater and decadent nonsense).