Our terms are short; comically short. We track the weeks like panicked time-keepers, looking on desperately as they slip past far too quickly. Before you know it, you’ve somehow become a second year, blinking at the calendar like an idiot and wondering where the time went. Michaelmas in particular feels like a strange initiation ritual – you return from the long summer thinking you remember how Cambridge works, only for the wind to slap you across the face and remind you that no, you definitely do not. We’re not here for long, but when we are, we live like we’re cramming an entire year into a glorified (and very busy) long weekend.

Friends elsewhere love to tell me we’re missing the ‘real’ student experience – the slow-burn independence of months away from home, long stretches of time to settle into routines and friendships and messy kitchens. But honestly? I’m not convinced. The brevity doesn’t make Cambridge feel smaller or any less like home; it makes everything more vivid. When every second is measured, each and every moment becomes harder to forget. Eight weeks turns life into technicolour. You learn to move quickly, feel deeply, and cling to the moments that might drift past unnoticed anywhere else. It’s not that we lack time. It’s that time refuses to behave normally here.

“Cambridge works like centrifugal force”

Life in an eight-week term takes on this strange intensity. We sprint between libraries, coffees, formals, and some new sport we signed up for with the optimism of people who definitely don’t have essays due. Everything becomes heightened by scarcity. You drag yourself to 9am lectures half asleep, fuel yourself on £3 lattes, and spend evenings debating whether to finish reading that chapter or go to spoons yet again – more often than not, it’s spoons. Cambridge works like centrifugal force: once you’re caught in its spin, you’re flung between activities, people, and deadlines with sickening speed. But there’s something exhilarating about it. With so little time to spare, even ordinary moments feel strangely significant.

And in one term, everything can tilt. The highs are genuinely soaring – the kind of nights out that feel like they should be preserved in amber, the friendships that grow from throwaway conversations in libraries, the sense of discovering corners of the city that feel entirely your own. But the lows are subterranean. A week can begin with heartbreak and end with you finding the people who feel like they were waiting for you. You can go from the smug relief of finishing a supervision essay early to the dramatic despair of realising you’ve forgotten about the one due tomorrow morning. More often than not, the person who arrives in week one feels like an early draft, and by week eight, you’re sharper, more exhausted and somehow entirely rewritten.

“We live like we’re cramming an entire year into a glorified (and very busy) long weekend”

This constant tilt is exhausting, but it’s also weirdly forgiving. No matter how chaotic your term has felt, there’s always the knowledge that Cambridge runs on a cycle of collapse and rebirth. Nowhere is this clearer than week five – the great equaliser. Everyone is behind. Everyone is tired. Everyone is held together with hope, blind faith, and deeply unhealthy volumes of coffee. Library floors become confessional spaces where you bond over shared exhaustion. Friends check in with the quiet solidarity of people who know you’re also two essays behind. Week five arrives quickly, and it’s when you realise the eight-week term isn’t an individual endurance test; it’s a collective one. There’s comfort in the fact that the entire university is collapsing in unison.

And that’s why the structure works. Because just when you feel like the bubble will swallow you whole, the holidays sweep in like a deus ex machina, rescuing the plot at the perfect moment. You go home, sleep more than you thought humanly possible, and slowly remember what the rest of the world looks like. You recalibrate. You forget how intense everything felt, until the next term rolls around and the cycle begins again.

We’re not here for long. Cambridge life is brief, bright, and often ridiculous. But maybe that’s exactly why it feels like it matters that our terms are so short. In eight weeks, everything is compressed: friendships, growth, mistakes, revelations, exhaustion, joy. It’s all heightened, all fleeting, all strangely magical. And each term, we return like characters in a new season, ready to throw ourselves back into the technicolour sprint – ready to dive back in, because somehow the madness is what keeps us coming back.