The Long Vacation, which promised to be full of detoxing, fresh air and productivity, interspersed with flashes of warm climates and cocktail-hazed fun, has inevitably fallen short of expectations. By this time, I was going to have paid back all the money I owe to my parents for the summer itself. I was going to have scratched up my French to ‘fluency’, completed five or six oil paintings, made headway on my best-selling book, started a blog, embarked upon the massive list of novels I didn’t have time to read during term, done meticulous internship research, connected with my family, made marvellous memories on holiday, practised two hours of yoga a day and altogether made myself into a shiny new and mature person. Oh and of course, have finished the 4000-word first draft dissertation I’m supposed to send to my DoS by September. 

Reality is, of course, sobering. It’s interesting that, when not encircled by the bubble of pressure and expectation that is Cambridge term time, so many of us suddenly feel stifled. It’s as if without the pressure we cannot feel as though we are achieving. There is a constant, anxious tightness in my chest about how much more my Cambridge peers must be accomplishing this summer, whether in travelling experience, cultural exposure, monetary gain, or simply in becoming more well-rounded and high-minded people. Think of all of the knowledge they must be absorbing! All of the sights they must be seeing! All the whilst I sit and feel as though I am in some sort of abyss; the result of both intellectual exhaustion - three terms of continuous essay writing and supervisions (one word: Chaucer) - followed by being plunged into the academic no man's land of summer holidays. This stark juxtaposition makes me feel as though I have regressed to an almost vegetative intellectual state.

This stupor effects everyone to a greater or lesser degree. Sure, not everyone at Cambridge is an incessant worrier like me. Some of you reading this will be snorting into your ice cold beers and traveller beards at the mere thought of panicking about taking a summer off. And don’t get me wrong; I am not pining for work. After three terms - and certainly after May Week - I was in desperate need of a holiday and still am. Having planned to spend as much time away from my hometown in the North (the life and soul of nothing), I have spent most of my summer either at friends’ houses or abroad. I have read a lot, but done not much else. The dissertation is still in its research stages. I have commenced everything about everything on my above list, but have completed nothing.

However, having spent three terms exhausting ourselves with twelve hour days of reading, writing and weekly all-nighters at Cindies, we need a couple of months to let our bodies and souls recover. We need time away from our friends at Cambridge, who we love to suffer and complain with, so we can re-engage with our families and friends in the non-Cambridge world. A real issue is that the only way the majority of Cambridge students feel that we are expanding as people is by pushing ourselves, primarily in our subjects but also in our personal lives. There is a constant pressure produced by Cambridge peers who appear incessantly involved with extra-curricular activities to add to their already illustrious CVs.

Yet reality serves this purpose too. Our minds develop with every new encounter and experience we have, even outside of Cambridge. The unfortunate side-effect of attending a high-achieving university is that it's important to distract yourself from the pressure of our subjects and our friends, (however tempting it is to morosely image how productive they’ve supposedly been.) It is extremely likely that they, like you, have taken time to recuperate. Rather than an opportunity to become the shinier version of ourselves that we’d naively imagined, the Long Vacation forces us to pause and reflect on exactly who we are and who we have become over the last gruelling but exhilarating year. Only through doing this, can we foster up the willpower we need to do it all again, come October.