Term dates (Michaelmas 2016) and rooms

I have noticed a few questions on the Facebook page about when you will be able move into your rooms at Newnham, and I thought it might be helpful to remind you about a few important dates and give you some other pieces of information.

First of all, term dates and room licence dates (not the same thing!): the official start of 'full term' is Tuesday 4 October, and teaching starts on Thursday 6 October, but new undergraduates are required to arrive the previous weekend.

Arrival dates:

• Science students - Saturday 1 October.
• Arts students (includes Architecture, Economics, Geography, HSPS - in case you were wondering!) - Sunday 2 October.
• All students will have a meeting with their Tutor on Sunday evening.
• There will be an important briefing session for all students on the morning of Monday 3 October.

Exceptions to these dates are:

• Subjects with a pre-term course or study day. If this applies to you, you will have received details in your information pack.
• Choral Scholars - you will be notified about rehearsals before the start of term and you can be in residence for these.
• Applicants for Instrumental Awards - details of auditions will be sent separately.
• EU and Overseas students: the earliest date on which you can occupy your room at Newnham will be Monday 26 September. There will be some special welcome activities for international students during that week.

Room licences:

• 30-week (3 x 10-week) room licences and 'continuous' (39-week) room licences both start on Saturday 1 October.
• If you wish to occupy your room before the start of your room licence, you must check with the Admissions Office that this is OK, and if it is for other than academic reasons, the extra nights will be added to your College bill.

Rooms:

• Unfortunately you do not get to choose your room. The students going into the second and third years of their courses chose their rooms last term, and the first-years get the ones which are left (sorry!). Happily, nearly all our rooms are lovely, and some people even seem to like the less lovely ones! 
• They are all single rooms - you won't have to share with anybody, but you will share a bathroom and a kitchen with a group of other undergraduates, so you will make friends very quickly.
• We cannot offer accommodation to parents during the first few days of term. If your parents wish to come to Cambridge with you, they will need to arrange to stay in a hotel or guesthouse. Information can be found here: http://www.visitcambridge.org/accommodation.You will be very busy when you first arrive, so they might also feel a bit lonely!
• We cannot store any boxes, cases or other belongings before you come into residence - we have very limited storage space, so please don't arrange for anything to be sent to you before you actually arrive.

Freshers 2016 - forms for the Admissions Office

If you are outside the UK, it's perfectly all right to send in your forms (e.g. College Feast, medical information etc) as scanned documents by email. However, those that need a signature, i.e. Conditions for Membership and Data Protection, should also be sent in hard copy - or you can bring them when you come to Cambridge.

If you are sending them by post within the UK, remember that large envelopes need more postage - every year we end up having to pay excess postage because some people haven't put enough stamps on, and it also delays them reaching us.

And a final plea, as the person who opens the envelopes: if you are folding the forms to fit into a smaller envelope, please fold them as a batch, and not each one separately - they only have to be unfolded and all put together again!