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My name is Rachel (she / her), I'm a first year engineering student at Jesus College, Cambridge, and this is a day in my life during the Easter vacation. I am currently living in college, but very few people that I know are back in Cambridge, so I'm spending a lot of time alone. I'm waiting for my friends to return next week, so my days usually involve a bit more social interaction than this! It’s approaching exam season, so I'm busy with revision, but have no classes since it’s not term time.
Today i did about 7-8 hours of work. During term, I can expect to work quite long days compared to other courses, usually starting at 9am and finishing quite late into the evening, with breaks for lunch, dinner and exercise , resulting in around 10-12 hours a day. I also take 3 ish evenings off a week to go to socials / see my friends, and do extracurriculars. It's totally manageable to have a social life / have hobbies and you learn to prioritise / fit things in, even with a heavy workload course like engineering.
Today is a Tuesday, my alarm goes off at 8am, and I get up, have my breakfast and a coffee between 8am and 9am. I like to start working at 9am, and this morning I spent an hour revising some of my notes from my electromagnetics lectures.
At 10am I left for a run. I am currently training for the Cambridge half marathon, but wanted to keep it brief today so did a quick 5k. I then had a shower and got ready, which took me to about 11am.
I did another hour of work between 11am-12pm, where I was working on an electronics past Tripos paper. At 12pm, I decided to go into town to get some lunch, since the hospitality sector opened up from lockdown yesterday and I'm yet to go! I went to a café on kings parade (with a beautiful view of king’s college!), and even though my friends aren't around to come with me, it was nice to take myself out for a treat. I also had a bit of a wander around town, looking in some shops and around the market.
At 1:30, I came home, got dressed and headed off to the boat house. I cox for my college boat club, i.e. I don't row, I shout at the rowers! The river is really quiet since its vacation which is always lovely. I got home at around 4pm, and worked for around 90 minutes. I am the publicity officer for CUSF (Cambridge University Spaceflight), and so I worked on a few new pages and a blog post for our website. At 5:30pm, I then took a well deserved half an hour off to call my parents, have a coffee and take a break on my phone.
Between 6pm and 8pm I had a library slot booked, so I went to my college library and finished the past paper that I was working on this morning. At 8pm I was pretty hungry so I came back to my staircase and cooked myself some dinner, ate, and watched some Netflix until about 9pm. For the rest of the evening, I facetimed my friend while I did some admin, dealt with my emails and planned my next day. I aim for bed around 12:30am most nights, though this can waver during term time.