matriculation

I have a backlog of quintissentially Cantabrigian experiences to report to you on, so I begin tonight with Matriculation. It's one of those wonderfully tradition-encrusted institutions of Cambridge life, and it marks the official beginning of membership in one's College. I've never read any Harry Potter books, but there were lots of elements of the experience that made me think of Harry Potter. (Quick review: Cambridge has 31 colleges, and each grad student is affiliated with one of them, more for housing and social life than for academics. Mine is Emmanuel College.)

The ceremony began with a group photo in the front court of the College, in front of the chapel. We were required to look respectable--dark suits for gents--and wear our academic gowns, which are a must-have unless you're at one of those "modern" and "progressive" colleges. Before the big group photo, I organized a smaller photo of the eight new Williams people at Emma this year. Unfortunately, the chapel is totally washed out in the late afternoon sun, but you can at least see the silly robes they make us wear:

Observant family members may notice that I'm wearing the "Nana tie," which just happens to be the Emmanuel College colors, pink and blue!

So, now the Harry Potter-esque part. The kernel of the Matriculation ceremony is signing your name in a big book as the Master of the College and the Graduate Tutor look on. Before they started calling us upstairs, we received very specific instructions: we were to write our full names, undergraduate institutions, and places of birth. For those born in the British Isles, that meant the "historic county" of birth--which led to puzzlement for those born in London, which has apparently devoured a lot of historic counties around it. Those born in the U.S., Canada, and Australia wrote our birth states or provinces, and everyone else was supposed to just write the country. A Russian student asked if that meant the country as it now exists, or as it existed at the time of birth, and I'm not sure if she got a satisfactory answer.

The head porter called us upstairs in alphabetical groups at five-minute intervals, whereupon we were ushered into an opulently furnished room with lots of portraits of dead Emmanuel fellows on the walls. We signed a bunch of papers that said we would uphold the values of Cambridge, pay "due respect and obedience" to the vice-chancellor and the university, and all that jazz. The Master, Graduate Tutor, and the book were in the next room at the head of a very long table, and the dean of the college called us in there one by one.

Finally it was my turn, and as I started writing in the book, the Master asked how many names I had. I informed him that, regretfully, I only have three, but it was my understanding that his full name is rather impressive. (His wikipedia page identifies him as "Richard Thomas James Wilson, Baron Wilson of Dinton GCB.") We chatted briefly about how I was getting along, and he congratulated me and said, "you are now a member of the College, and will be for the rest of your life." For some reason, I thought of that kid from The Sandlot going "FOR-EV-ER. FOR-EV-ER."

Naturally, when everyone has signed the book, a lavish evening of drinking and eating ensued. The end.

stephen hawking: "totally overrated"

I enjoyed this bit of cheeky student humour from Varsity, one of the Cambridge University newspapers. The story is about the announcement of a gigantic bronze sculpture that is being planned to honor Stephen Hawking, the famous Cambridge theoretical physicist who has been almost completely paralyzed by ALS for decades:

The sculpture has sparked debate amongst students. One finds Hawking
underserving of such a tribute: "He seems totally overrated when compared
to, say, Newton." However, a graduate student commented that "he deserves
much more than a paltry 10ft statue."

I passed by Professor Hawking on the street this weekend, which I suspect is the closest I will ever get to having contact with him. As you can imagine, he's one of Cambridge's most famous characters, and he seems to inhabit an intellectual universe that the rest of us can only guess about. You can read his account of his astonishing life with ALS here.

in search of "development"

So you've probably noticed that my blogging has been quite sporadic, and the reason is one that I predicted when I started: my life here makes lousy blogging material. An illustration: last night somebody asked me what I did all week, and I found myself totally at a loss for words. I think I said something about lots of reading and then changed the subject. From time to time there will be lots of scintillating travel blog material as I trot off elsewhere in the UK and Europe, and to Africa (more on that later...). In the meantime, I think the only way for me to keep up my blogging mojo is to share a little bit about what I'm reading, writing, and thinking about at Cambridge. I will try to keep it interesting, and if anyone out there feels inspired to respond or question, please fire away.

First, a little bit of background. My program is an M.Phil in Development Studies, and if you don't know what "Development Studies" means, you're in good company-- I encounter a lot of puzzlement from fellow Cambridge students, usually those in the sciences or humanities. The type of "Development" in question is not the development of children, nor is it much concerned with nonprofit fundraising. In this case, "Development" refers to the project of raising standards of living in the non-industrialized countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

The development project really began in the churn of world events after the Great Depression and World War II. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were established to provide funds for reconstruction and to prevent another collapse in the worldwide financial system, respectively. (The extent to which both institutions have since drifted from their original missions is a fascinating topic in itself.) The success of the Marshall Plan, the U.S.-led and -financed effort to rebuild Europe after the war, made the idea that rich countries could help poor countries grow their economies seem attractive and realistic. In his 1949 inaugural address, President Harry Truman called for "a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas." As usual, there was a large dose of enlightened self-interest mixed in with the benevolence: aid would become a potent Cold War containment strategy as the U.S. wooed developing countries away from the Soviet sphere of influence.

Sixty years later, it's amazing how many of the fundamental issues surrounding development and international economics remain unresolved. Our current international financial crisis has loomed in the background, and sometimes taken center stage, in most of the lectures I have attended so far. John Maynard Keynes (the economist I mentioned in last week's tea-drinking episode, and one of the fathers of the above-mentioned World Bank and IMF) wrote a lot about the causes of the Great Depression, and substituting a few words you could make him sound like he was writing about what's going on right now. Karl Marx is enjoying a bit of a renaissance as well. I'm happy to be in grad school right now for job market reasons, but it also seems like I've come here at the perfect time to revisit all of these great political-economic-philosophical debates.

I should also mentioned another, more contemporary debate that has attracted my keen interest--to the extent that I suspect whatever conclusions I arrive at for myself will heavily influence what I do with my working life. In this corner we have Jeffrey Sachs: economist, UN advisor, friend of Bono, and the man that I once said was "who I want to be when I grow up." And in this corner we have Bill Easterly: economist, critic of Bono and Jeffrey Sachs, who was essentially chased out of the World Bank for his contrarian opinions. To boil them down to one sentence apiece: Sachs believes that we already know what needs to be done to achieve big development goals, and what we need is more money, more effort, and more willpower from the international community. Easterly believes that big development plans are doomed to fail, and that the people who really make development happen are not the "planners" but the "searchers" who experiment on the ground and find smaller-scale solutions that work. You can see why the Sachs view wins on emotional appeal and is more likely to be embraced by the development "industry," but in a lot of ways I find Easterly more persuasive. The planners vs. searchers dichotomy is a little bit artificial, of course, but I have a feeling that someday I will face career decisions that will present some variation of this question-- and I want to be ready to make the choice when that time comes.

fresher's week dispatches

A financial bailout. So far I have been able to avoid the worst of what Cambridge's bureacracy can dish out, but I had a close call on Thursday. After getting out of my morning lecture, I hustled down to the Language Centre to sign up for a French class. The enrollment hours were brief and deviously inconvenient, and the place was jammed with people when I got there. Finally I made it to the front of the line and explained my dilemma. The class cost £100, payable by cash or cheque, but I couldn't come up with the payment that day. I had signed up for my bank account the previous week, but they hadn't sent me my chequebook yet. I had deposited my Gates stipend at my bank on Monday, but it takes cheques at least four days to clear in the UK, so I couldn't withdraw cash from the ATM. Knowing that my situation was not my fault and that lots of new Cambridge students must be in a similar boat, asked if I could reserve a spot in the almost-full class and pay at one of the later enrollment days, emphasizing all along how committed I was to taking the class.

To paraphrase the response: "not a prayer, buster-- come back when you have the money." Crap. I knew that the class was going to fill up, and it was now or never. A few moments of desperate haggling and attempts at negotiating failed. However, I was in luck-- there was another Gates Scholar in line behind me, whom I've known since we interviewed in Annapolis in February. She spoke up and offered to front me the money; she had gotten to Cambridge long before I had and consequently had a chequebook. I gratefully accepted and paid her back as soon as my cheques arrived, enclosing my repayment in an effusive thank-you note with a promise to buy her a cocktail at next week's Gates dinner cruise on the Thames.

If I had been shut out of the class, it would not at all have been an atypical experience for a Cambridge student. There are just so many uncoordinated moving parts around here, so many offices and institutions that don't talk to each other, so many delays intersecting with deadlines. Most people manage to scrape by, but you do hear the occasional horror story, and my missing out on the class wouldn't have been so bad in comparison to other possibilities.

A stroll to Grantchester. On a much happier note, this weekend I rounded up a posse to walk along a footpath on the River Cam to the tiny hamlet of Grantchester. The village is home to a teahouse known as The Orchard, which once played host to a remarkable group of friends. For the half-decade preceding WWI, The Orchard was a hangout for a subset of the Bloomsbury Group-- including the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the novelists E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, the poet Rupert Brooke, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Amazingly, they became friends before most of them had done their most significant work. Keynes is of greatest personal interest to me, as an economist with whom I have a lot of intellectual sympathy. (Hint: he's pretty much the boogeyman among the "just let the market run its course and everything will be fine" set.) I'll close with a shot of some contemporary Cantabrigians following in their leisurely footsteps:

4 glasses of wine + orientation

After a week in Cambridge I am just beginning to wrap my mind around the innumerable ways in which the whole approach to education here is different from what I am used to in the U.S. It will take several posts to digest and share my thoughts, but I'll start with one of the most interesting features of Cambridge life -- the college system -- including a "not in Kansas anymore" experience from the other night.

This thing called "The University of Cambridge" is basically an administrative shell for an unruly collection of institutions, including 31 self-governing colleges, various academic departments and committees, and a wide assortment of other entities (such as the Gates Cambridge Trust). As our Gatesian elders warned us during the Lake District trip, navigating this often baffling system is one of the primary challenges of our lives here and an excellent education unto itself.

For grad students such as yours truly, the 31 colleges exist primarily as centers of residential and social life. The colleges vary widely in personality, age (ranging from 31 to 724 years) , wealth (£8 million to £700 million), and student body composition (grad vs. undergrad, male vs. female, home vs. international). Reflecting the pious history of the university, six colleges are named after Jesus or God in some form (Christ's, Corpus Christi, Emmanuel, Jesus, Trinity, and Trinity Hall). Other colleges bear the names of monarchs, clergy, famous alumni (Darwin), and political figures (Churchill).

When I was applying to Cambridge, I had to rank my top two college preferences. At the time I didn't know any of them from Adam -- from Adam's College? -- and frankly didn't feel up to sorting through the morass. Luckily, I had a lazy but defensible way out of making a real decision. For historical reasons I won't bore you with, nearly all Williams alumni at Cambridge are at Emmanuel College. Indeed, "Emma" is a veritable Williams-in-exile, typically with about 20 Ephs in residence at any one time. The current crop consists mostly of 07's and 08's, and I actually knew a few of the former the last time we shared a campus. And Emma just happens to be a great college for lots of other reasons-- it has a rich historical pedigree (founded 1584) without being snooty or overly traditional, it's centrally located, reasonably wealthy, has very pretty grounds, and is neither too big nor too small. Of course, it seems that everyone at Cambridge believes their college to be the best college, so maybe it's just the brainwashing setting in.

Now, say you were a college administrator and you had to put the following activities in a suitable order: (A) dance party, (B) introductory remarks by college bigwigs in an auditorium, (C) multiple-course dinner with multiple courses of wine, and (D) cocktails. In America, surely, the order would be BDCA. Apparently that's not how it's done in Britain, though, because on Monday night we had all consumed at least four servings of alcohol before the bigwigs spoke.

The evening began with the cocktails, followed by the first MCR* formal hall** of Michaelmas Term.*** The food was actually quite good, and we were served a glass of wine with almost every course: white wine with the appetizer, red with the main course, port with dessert. The Master**** of the College said grace in Latin before and after the meal. I was seated next to a very sweet Scottish girl who, sadly, I had a very hard time understanding due to her accent and the horrible acoustics. Her failure to touch her wine led to quizzical comments her friends on the other side of the table, and I watched in amazement as she put away three glasses in rapid succession and then continued our conversation without missing a beat.

Once we were, ummm, warmed up, we proceeded to the auditorium for welcoming remarks from Master Wilson, the Senior Tutor*****, the Head Porter******, and the president of the MCR. All of the speeches were actually quite funny and entertaining... but it could have just been the wine. The Head Porter, who bears a striking resemblance to Terry Bradshaw, was particularly funny. Finally, at the end of the evening, we proceeded to the Old Library (where we started with the cocktails) for a 90s-themed bop******* under the eyes of the dead white guys whose portraits hang on the walls.

And yes, you read that right: all of this happened on Monday night. Apparently the idea that most of one's drinking should be done on the weekend is an American invention too.

Vocab:
*Middle Combination Room (MCR): refers to the social organization for the grad students and the grad students themselves as a unit, in addition to the physical room where they congregate.
**Formal hall: a sumptuous multi-course dinner, eaten by candlelight in formal dress and academic robes.
***Michaelmas Term: October to December.
****Master: like a college president. Ours is a member of the House of Lords who has worked for Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
*****Senior Tutor: an academic who oversees the welfare of grad students in the college. Ours is a chemist, and it seems like an odd feature of the UK system that he has to spend some of his time assigning us rooms, but that's how it works.
******Porter: no equivalent in the US system, porters are responsible for security, locks, mail delivery, and otherwise keeping the gears turning.
*******Bop: dance party. I didn't need a footnote for that, I just wanted to use seven asterisks.

lake district recap

I am back in Cambridge for the madness of "freshers' week" after a fun but soggy few days in the Lake District. A few thoughts before I return to the more mundane tasks of assembling my life:

The Scholars. I traveled with 100-odd Gates scholars, most of them freshly minted like me, but there was also a number of returning scholars doing multi-year degrees who served as our chaperones/tour guides. I referred to them as "the elders" until I realized that I am older than most of them; one, in fact, is younger than my youngest sibling! For those not familiar with the program, the Gates Cambridge Trust can theoretically support scholars from any country except the UK. Our group was roughly half Americans, but it included students from countries ranging from Canada to Zambia to Croatia to Malaysia.

Poets and opium-heads. Our Lake District amusements included orienteering in the rain, hiking in the rain, kayaking in the rain, visiting a gingerbread bakery in the rain, and touring the former home of the great poet William Wordsworth in the rain. Wordsworth's house began its life as a pub and hosted a number of colorful men of letters as long-term houseguests. Sir Walter Scott, who tried his best to be polite but could not abide by the Wordsworths' teetotaling and twice-daily consumption of porridge, would sneak out the window of the guest room each morning to get a proper English breakfast and a pint of beer before his hosts woke up. Another guest, Thomas de Quincey, penned Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, possibly launching the addiction-memoir genre that has more recently given us Augusten Burroughs and James Frey.

Encounters with bad British food, volume 1. On the way to the Lake District, we stopped at a park for a picnic lunch. We were each issued the kind of lunch you carried to school in 3rd grade: a sandwich, a bag of "crisps," a juice box, fruit, and some "biscuits," all in a brown paper bag. The first unusual thing I noticed about my tuna sandwich was that it had corn in it, which seemed odd but wasn't a dealbreaker. (The Subway chain has stores here, and it has corn in its lineup of vegetable toppings.) A few bites in, however, I noticed a taste that was vaguely familiar, mildly unpleasant, and definitely out of place. I puzzled aloud about the taste until a nearby scholar, an Irish woman, filled me in on the mystery ingredient: margarine. Tuna salad, white bread, corn, and margarine-- yuck. Fortunately, the names of the crisps and the biscuits provided some comic relief. The flavors of crisps included "Ready Salted" and "Prawn Cocktail," while my cookies carried the appetizing name of "Digestives."

The family name. Perhaps as some kind of karmic compensation for elementary school taunts about my last name, the Powers name won me an unprecedented degree of cachet with the Gates crowd. A few of the returning Gates scholars who organized the trip told me that they were eager to meet me because of my name. I accepted the compliment as graciously as I could, but mentioned that my name couldn't stand up to that of one of my Alaska friends, Dan Stellar. The name Daniel just sounds like a winner all around, and when combined with a last name that's a synonym for "awesome," it's pretty much impossible to compete.