Another lovely day: more reading, some tennis, and reading once more.
Over the course of the week, as time has passed, I can see that I’ve been drawn into making decisions about how involved I would like to be in things here. During my undergraduate course, I tried my hand at pretty much everything that was on offer there. Five years was a long time in one place, and it felt suitable to sign-up to things, and then decide how committed I would like to be. I was, however, guilty of signing up for things and not following through on some of them – because by the time the event or submission came around, I found myself electing to be uncommitted. Largely this was down to my own flawed perception of where my interests lay. I have to say I feel I got better at this in Years 4 and 5, where I only did stuff I would commit to wholeheartedly. The rest I volunteered for, without much responsibility – taking on only the responsibility I could actually agree to.
Cambridge is larger than my undergraduate University in terms of size and population. Naturally as a consequence of that and people’s diverse interests, there’s a Society for everything you can think of, and a space to learn anything you are interested in. I’m very curious about most things in the world, and given a chance, I’d just rotate among the 200+ odd Societies that are on offer. But even then I wouldn’t be able to experience it all well, becuase having so many societies to fit into a week would just mean clashing commitments all of the time.
So it was, through Fresher’s Fair and this week that I’ve eliminated a bunch of things and unsubscribed from mailing lists. Some events are events I genuinely want to know are happening – even if I don’t attend, and so I’ve stayed onto the mailing lists. Societies and Clubs form a large part of the social interaction you can have here, and so I’m committing to the events I would like to meet people at the most. Some of them I’m on because I’m curious about meeting these people, who share an interest or a perspective divergent from mine.
Which brings us back to tennis and some sports. I can only commit to them socially – and without paying for them (because I cannot commit to them every week). As a result I’m literally on a Social Tennis WhatsApp group – finding people of the same or similar level to play with week-on-week.
Hopefully we shall improve together. We’ll definitely have fun though.
Tejas Rao 