Are we supposed to find the best version of ourselves at university? The question has become a quiet obsession for many students, often phrased as the ultimate undergraduate aspiration: by the end of our three years, we’ll have “found ourselves,” and crowned our university days as the golden period of our lives.

Robin Harding, Clare alumnus and now Asia Editor of The Financial Times (FT), is evidence that we should dismiss this idea: “I can’t regale you with my glory days.” He candidly reveals: “I was a shy and unworldly kid when I first arrived at Cambridge, and I was quite overwhelmed by it all,” a description that surprisingly parallels another successful FT journalist and Harding’s former boss, Gillian Tett.

“I was a shy and unworldly kid when I first arrived at Cambridge”

Growing up in Durham to two academics – his mother, the Keeper of Oriental Books at Oxford and his father, a professor of Archaeology also at Oxford – Harding had the perfect prelude to a career of reading, thinking, and writing.

When Harding arrived to study Social and Political Sciences (later switching to Economics) at Clare College in 1997, like most of us, he was not the self-assured undergraduate we all thought we needed to be. This nervousness was especially because “my school didn’t have a lot of people who’d been to Cambridge,” he says.

He summarises what is perhaps the real Cambridge undergraduate experience beyond the fancy formals and CVs: “I read a lot. I probably drank more than was good for me [...] I made great friends, lifelong ones.” He wasn’t one of those people “who seemed to know exactly what they were meant to be doing”.

It’s oddly comforting to picture someone who now leads the FT’s entire Asia bureau as a lost fresher. “It’s quite a common experience,” he continues. “A good half of everyone is sort of fairly bewildered, and just trying to find our way through, but that’s fine. You grow and you learn and sometimes it’s hard, but that’s all part of the learning experience.”

After graduating in 2000, he followed what seemed the logical route for a Cambridge economist: internships, investment banking graduate schemes, and a year in London.

“It’s quite disillusioning when you encounter the reality of finance”

However, Harding admits: “It’s quite disillusioning when you encounter the reality of finance”. “These institutions are full of incredibly bright people doing deals involving huge sums of money – but they’re also very narrow, and the ways the finance industry makes money aren’t always aligned with the client’s interest.”

Still, the glamour of it all was hard to ignore. “I did an internship at Merrill Lynch,” he says. “The internship scheme was absolutely insane … they hired out the National History Museum to have a dinner for us [the interns].” But eventually, the thrill faded: “I didn’t find meaning in it.”

“There’s no great master plan to describe,” but what followed for Harding was a year in a public policy think tank, a Master’s degree in Japan, and an eight-month stint at HSBC.

A chance to pivot came when the Peter Martin Fellowship, named after the late FT Deputy Editor, offered a three-month internship. Although staying at a bank would’ve guaranteed a lucrative trajectory, Harding quit his job, and it was all worth it.

Yes, it was a big career change, but the risk wasn’t as reckless as one may think. “It’s not like it was some … disastrous financial sacrifice,” he says. “I was really excited by journalism. I’d taken a properly salaried job with an established institution […] that also allows me to get closer to things that really make me happy.” In fact, “on day one, as an intern, I wrote an editorial for the FT that was published the next day […] and it completely blew my mind.”

All of Harding’s seemingly “false starts” converged here. “By the time I came into it … I’d studied Economics at Cambridge, worked in several parts of the financial industry, spent two years in Japan, worked on the fringes of public policy.” At the time, those ventures may have felt like detours, “but none of that was irrelevant” to Harding’s final calling as a financial journalist.

If there’s one thing to take away from Harding’s story, it’s this: our time as an undergraduate is about starting the long, meandering work of moulding ourselves into someone we can grow into – someone we can be proud of. And that is all we really need to do.