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I learnt lots of stuff - not to say you can't learn stuff elsewhere, but the supervision system in particular has really made sure I understand everything we have been learning
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Access to internships/ careers opportunities - now, I can't say that other universities aren't also very good at this, but at Cambridge I've been lucky enough to attend countless employer presentations/ networking sessions, go on insight days, and it did seem to give me a helping hand in internship applications (in that friends elsewhere with similar academics/ experience otherwise struggled a lot more - but that's obviously a tiny sample size)
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Financially - Cambridge doubled my maintenance grant, gave me a very generous scholarship (admittedly paid by a private company, but it was only available for students at certain universities, pretty much all "top" ones), and has (through various grants) massively supported my personal travels and sports
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So many extracurricular opportunities - sports, outreach work, extra lectures/ talks, music - all at both super relaxed and university levels
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STRESS - so much stress... Even having balanced twice the standard workload during A levels I still found coping with Cambridge incredibly challenging. It wasn't so much the quality of work as the lack of guidelines and support in producing it - no past paper markschemes, no set syllabus, no example coursework pieces, no guidelines on what is expected in coursework, no retake opportunities, hardly any coursework credit (lots of work, for a very small percentage of our overall grade), ridiculously time pressured exams, no real attempt to ensure examiners or lab supervisors are marking to the same standard, etc.
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Grade based partly on your ranking (at least in the first few years), making for a very competitive and non-supportive atmosphere among students - which contributed towards a focus on passing exams and getting good coursework marks rather than just learning overall
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College inequalities - they all claim to be "basically the same" but in reality there are so many inequalities between the colleges, I'm not going to list them all here but essentially the quality of academic support and even things like accommodation quality/ prices vary so much
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No year abroad/ placement year opportunities/ support - I really had to FIGHT to be allowed to take a year out for my year abroad (which was independently organised and didn't count towards my degree), and they seem totally uninterested in providing work experience or international opportunities for students, despite it being really valuable for your career.
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Banning part-time jobs - they make us feel like kids by imposing such restrictions on what we can and cannot do with our spare time
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