Grudgebridge, can we stop moaning about Cambridge please?

It’s not helping anyone.

Cambridge cambridge students Cambridge University College Grudgebridge Student Students Tab

I can’t abide Grudgebridge. And every one of the posts on it. 

What purpose does it serve, what progress does it actually achieve? Why do we feel the need here to constantly compare everyone to each other – who is more deserving to be here, or who does the most work? What help can the readers provide you when everything is completely anonymous, or when trivial posts about soggy duck in Queens’ buttery are interspersed with serious posts about struggling with life? If something is designed to encourage negative comment, it can never be a force for good.

Oh that old debate about who does more work again… yawn…

Instead of pointing out the negatives, we should celebrate the fact that we’re studying at Cambridge. Yes, the terms are tough, the days are long and stressful, the contact hours through the roof. But we’re incredibly fortunate to be here: we get to spend time with world-leading academics, live in amazing colleges, have a fantastic theatre and sports scene, countless balls and parties, plus the majority of people are conscientious and unprejudiced in a way that many outside of the ‘bubble’ are not. Yes there are exceptions to all of these, but overall I’ve found it’s an excellent, safe place to grow up.

There are worse views to wake up to…

I get that this isn’t the case for all. At times, or sometimes even all the time, Cambridge is hard. It’s easy for personal issues unrelated to university life, or even those caused as a result of university life, to rise to the the surface: something for which the constant work load provides a less-than-ideal environment to deal with.

But we must accept it was our choice to come here. We decided to pick our subject, apply, travel to interviews and work hard to get the grades knowing what we were getting ourselves in for. We had so many chances to turn it down. But we didn’t. Nowadays, it seems we are all insistent on blaming other people for issues that are our own doing.

UCAS, spelt U-C-random-red-triangle-S

And this is what Grudgebridge epitomises. And it doesn’t help any of us in the daily battle that we call life at Cambridge. Its negativity only breeds further negativity, making us feel even worse about ourselves and our university, whilst its anonymity and lack of response provides no constructive help for the issues we face. What we need is to do stuff that will actually enact change: as people have done before, write about stuff that bothers you for a student newspaper, protest, go see a counsellor, or tell your friends and family about how your feeling. If there are issues, we need to open debate to remedy injustice.

But please, please don’t hide behind a computer screen if you’re feeling terrible about anything.

Because you won’t get any help, and that’ll just make you feel worse.