It's been almost three weeks of full term here at Cambridge and our understanding of how final year life will continue is beginning to take it's dominant shape. Cambridge has an odd and ancient system when giving students an overall grade for their degree; the degree itself is broken up into parts - for Computer Scientists we have a Part IA, IB and II for each year. When being examined, we are allocated three separate grades for each part. Employers usually assume that the grade you report to them is your final year grade (I'm also told though that we are perfectly entitled to submit any one of our three separate grades). Hence the pressure is on to perform this year since this is completely separate to your other grades. Furthermore, for those of us who did not score too well in the past couple of years, the pressure is higher still.

Every employer in the world will specify a 2.i, which is understandable given the vast amount of applicants there are for most jobs. The system here for Computer Science dictates that only 60% of the year (IIRC) will receive either a 1st or a 2.i grade. This is a problem. The pressure of trying to up your grade in the final year as well as competing with every other student to make it into the top 60% is quite significant. It's made worse by the lack of promising job opportunities. As one of the careers service advisors recently told me, the economy is squeezing the supply of graduate jobs. With the demise of investment banking, a whole load of well qualified and very competitive students are now looking for alternative avenues to a prestigious and well paid career. Supposedly a 2.ii from here is equivalent to a 2.i from other universities (I personally don't subscribe to this school of thought since I cannot have any accurate idea what it is like in other universities). Most employers don't take this into account though.

As much as I enjoyed my summer internship, unfortunately they were unable to offer me a position which accommodated my gap year and travel plans. I'm now applying for jobs as a backup, and with any luck I'll return as another intern to the same firm next summer as further backup.

This leaves us in a state of fear. I've only once before felt as unready to return to university as I did at the beginning of this term, and that was last in first year after breaking my thumb. Regardless, I've cancelled all but the most essential extra-curricular activities I took part in (leaving only cycling). I don't know if it is possible to increase my rank by 25 but I'm going to try.