Cambridge absorbs identity; it’s a badge we wear for a sense of selfhood, a way of situating ourselves in the world. Freshers are so-called for their new start in life, but the label needs caution. The risk is forgetfulness of family, friends, home: too clean a break from our pre-Cambridge community. Plants grow from the ground up, so here is an injunction to remember your roots.

Home contact is a good way to preserve our heritage. In a Varsity poll asking how often students phone home, responses ranged from contact twice a day to weekly, fortnightly and ‘never’. The highest-scoring category was daily contact, but this is probably a skew in self-reporting. National data is much more modest, with only 17% of parents contacting their children daily according to one survey. It tends to be parents on the pushing end – 41% of parents want more frequent communication, and 94% want calls at least weekly, says a 2021 survey.

Eve is a second-year History student from Liverpool, and one of two social secretaries of the Northern Society. She calls home every three or four days and finds it “quite comforting”. She told me that she does “really enjoy speaking to family back home, especially being from Liverpool […] we’ve got quite a distinct accent and quite a distinct culture there.”

“Far from losing her sense of the scouser-self, she feels more aware of her heritage since moving to university”

Far from losing her sense of the scouser-self, she feels more aware of her heritage since moving to university. “It gives you something about you,” she said, given that the Liverpudlian contingent is comparatively small in Cambridge. In 2024, only 7% of students admitted to Cambridge came from the North-West, next to a near-third from Greater London. “Because there are so few of us, we just form a special connection really quickly,” she said: examples include a 20-minute conversation with a stranger in McDonalds at 3AM, identified by his accent. In her second year, Eve feels like she’s “got quite a strong grip” on her sense of self and connection with home, and her family “definitely worry about it more than I do”.

The distance stretches further for international students. Choon Wee is a third-year Law student from Singapore whose habits of communication have picked up in third year: in his first and second year he “did contact [parents] lesser and I do feel bad about that to be fair. I think because first year I was trying to adjust to life here, and then second year it was just a matter of busyness”.

According to a Sky Mobile survey of 2000 UK parents and students, reasons given for not communicating more include being too busy with coursework (46%) and not wanting to worry parents with stress (26%). But hiding problems from loved ones is harder than we think: research shows that 44% of parents worry their child is not telling them the whole story about their life at university.

“Staying in touch with home can be a comfort in difficult times, but homesickness is a home-oriented pain”

Choon Wee calls his parents for “important stuff like […] when things are really bad” and appreciates his family’s support across time zones, recalling a difficult episode when his parents picked up the phone at a late-night hour in Singapore. The other half of thick and thin is celebrating good times together; this translates imperfectly over the phone. On birthdays, Choon Wee and family “just have a cake and then we just sing a birthday song […] now that I’m here I just watch them eat the cake”.

Staying in touch with home can be a comfort in difficult times, but homesickness is a home-oriented pain. Hearing the voice of loved ones can be bittersweet for students feeling the distance.

“I do miss them admittedly when things get tough – especially in Michaelmas when the sun sets really early and you have more time to be emotional about stuff,” says Choon Wee. In these times, contact with parents gives him “the feeling and nourishment of being connected back to something at home again. But at the same time then when I hang up the call […] I just feel a little bit worse than I was before that”. For Eve, too, home contact cuts both ways: talking to parents “sort of reminds me what I’m missing out on. But, at the same time, it reminds you of what you’re working towards”.

The warm and fuzzy feeling is scientific fact: hormones respond to vocal cues without physical contact. Studies show an oxytocin uptick and reduction in salivary cortisol (the stress hormone) on hearing a mother’s voice. Eve enjoys hearing her own accent on the phone; these are gut-level reminders of heritage and home.

Still, long-distance phone calls and virtual cake are gap-fillers; nothing substitutes for the real thing. Eleanor is a second-year Engineer born and raised in the city. With family in Cambridge, she goes home once or twice a fortnight, and finds that “it’s nice to kind of get out of the zone of uni and just back to normal life”. Other perks include letting parents do laundry and celebrating special occasions in person “as much as I can”. Pros and cons recalibrate at different distances; she thinks that closeness to home has made her less independent, but tells me “I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced any homesickness”.

The celebrated diversity of a university city starts at home: it depends on remembering other people and places. Keeping up ties with loved ones enriches our sense of self and grounds us all for a firmer future. Forward-looking students with respect for the past will make the best kind of progress.