Crawling is human nature. In the steps of those wise Roman pioneers who first thought to multiply the night’s enjoyment by hopping from tavern to tavern, we all love a pub crawl. Why stay put, after all, when a stretch of inviting establishments – each vying for your attention – adorns every street? Then, of course, there’s its daytime counterpart: the cafe crawl, for those who prefer to drift from one bakery to the next, croissant in hand and caffeine coursing through veins. As recent TikTok trends have proven, there are many more versions to choose from – the study crawl, the museum crawl, and the book shop crawl all routinely surface on my For You Page. Today, though, I’d like to present to you a new variant: the lecture crawl.

Browsing through Cambridge’s kaleidoscopic range of lecture offerings the summer before starting my MPhil, I set myself a goal: I would try to explore as many topics as possible. Though the task is sometimes challenging when my mound of coursework seems to increase by the minute, I’m determined to stick to it.

“Lecture hopping can be a bit of a gamble”

It was on a crisp Thursday in October, when the autumn air felt particularly opportune, that I embarked on my first venture. Stealthily, I creeped into Little Hall, downplaying the anticipation of sitting in on a lecture about the Victorian novel. As my experience has shown, lecture hopping can be a bit of a gamble. You’re never quite sure what you’re about to witness. That day, though, the projector flickered on and revealed that the topic of the class was to be on The Moonstone, that Wilkie Collins book that TS Eliot deemed “the best of English detective novels.” Miraculously, the timing was perfect. Having read the novel for the first time that summer, I found the lecture insightful and relevant. And, I can confidently say that the troubling history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond is now forever etched into my head.

Since that day, I’ve sat in on quite a few literary lectures. Each time, they beam with rich contextual information, historical tidbits, and eye-opening close readings. It’s no surprise that I enjoy them, though – I was an English major.

“Slowly and subtly, cloudy whirls of derivatives and sequences spurred from the caves of my memory”

While the humanities are especially close to my heart, I like to cast my net wide. Occasionally, this means being humbled by a slew of scientists and mathematicians. One early morning, feeling nostalgic for my eccentric undergrad econ professor, I ventured into Lady Mitchell Hall to attend a maths-focussed economics class. Certain that I’d left the Taylor series in high school, my brain was not quite prepared for this turn of events. And yet, there I was: scratching variables into Goodnotes and nodding enigmatically at the lecturer who, making eye contact with me, optimistically asserted that the theorems were “obvious, of course.” As expected, half of the lecture flew miles above my head but, slowly and subtly, cloudy whirls of derivatives and sequences spurred from the caves of my memory. It was a miracle. I almost longed to study calculus again.

Even if a lecture is radically outside your field, you’re sure to learn something interesting. Through these crawls, I’ve formed a neat collection of fun facts: ‘billion’ means ‘trillion’ in German; a master was vicariously liable for his servant’s wrongdoings so long as the latter was not ‘on a frolic of his own’; and, Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her epic The Battle of Marathon when she was only 14. So, if you’re a wannabe pub quiz champion like me, you might just find what you’re looking for.

“If you’re a wannabe pub quiz champion like me, you might just find what you’re looking for”

My adventures have also shown me that subjects are like planets, with atmospheres, environments, and inhabitants of their own. On the law planet, you’ll find documents stretched out to cover every square millimeter of each computer screen, and a hailstorm of typing in every moment of the lecturer’s silence. On the philosophy planet, there’s a palpable pensiveness that accompanies pages of handwritten notes. Yet, despite these differences, our galaxy is the same. Across lectures, lessons of comparative analysis, tales of decolonial efforts, and envelope-pushing, innovations creep up. Sure, we’re all Cambridge students, but there is far more that unites us.

So, on a day when you don’t have any pressing assignments, give it a try! Stroll over to Sidgwick Site and, in true lecture crawl fashion, spend a few hours moving from hall to hall. Whether the stars align and you end up at a lecture perfectly tied to your interests, or you find yourself in a place most outside of your orbit, one thing is guaranteed: your time will not be wasted.