As I was waving off a friend at the end of last term, I joked about whether I’ll ever see them again in Easter: quiet period, am I right? Only, the joke didn’t land; they had no clue what quiet period was.

This still stuns me. What do you mean you’re not bombarded with signs demanding “QUIET PLEASE” or reminding you that this is “AN ACADEMIC COMMUNITY” every time you walk into plodge? Formals just…continue? While my college friends and I made bets about when the quiet period email would come (before C Sunday? After C Sunday? Before term’s even started?), we wondered what life was like in these quiet period-free oases.

Well, probably not exactly the carefree havens we imagined. This is Cambridge after all: their libraries are likely just as packed, quiet period or not. The thing is, I’m not wholly opposed to quiet periods – I understand why they are implemented. The benefits are obvious. Students need to focus; no one wants a bunch of freshers raving outside their door while they’re revising for their finals. But, their effect is not just about noise control, it’s cultural too. When colleges slap up signs around their grounds telling tourists to stay out, they implicitly encourage us to stay in. For a huge chunk of term, we are subliminally encouraged to lock ourselves away, forgo human contact, and work to excess.

“It is not just about noise control, it’s cultural too”

While Mimi Ronson makes the point that non-stop work is normalised, indeed glorified, by students, this is only exacerbated during exam season. We lord how many hours we spent at the library that day over our peers, mentally or in practice (very healthy), and shudder or sneer at the prospect of going out or taking time off. Study hermits are in, functional human beings are out. Quiet periods only enhance this, fostering an environment where to overwork is to succeed. College libraries are crammed. For many students their desk becomes their new home as they don’t even bother to leave for meals. This overspills into other study spaces until the whole college becomes like a can of stressed, sweaty (please wear deodorant guys!), sardines. People you once saw every day disappear for weeks, emerging from their rooms struggling to remember the last time they saw sunlight. And this is just accepted as the norm. As soon as you step into plodge, a pervasive nagging feeling greets you, telling you that it’s time to get to work.

When students receive letters and emails telling them what they can and can’t do, when enjoyable, social activities like formals are limited (sorry to all the summer babies out there), and threats of being Deaned are thrown in for good measure, what else is quiet period but a tense sponsored silence we undergo months?

Many may not be bothered about quiet periods: they follow their own routine, make time for friends and can basically go about their normal business without fretting. My worry is that for some this isn’t so simple. I fear that quiet periods lend themselves to making colleges hostile environments, disencouraging breaks and crucial downtime because there is this constant awareness that two floors below you, or in the building next door, there is a packed study room full of people working and you’re lying in bed. Exam guilt is bad enough without these constant reminders.

“Quiet periods lend themselves to making colleges hostile environments”

Living off-site in my second year has really brought this to my attention. My work-life balance is so much healthier than in first year because there is a clear distinction: I study in a library, I go home to a normal, domestic, communal space. I actively avoid working in college now because of its confining atmosphere. But I wonder how isolating quiet period must be for those without this binary (and for me when I return to college accommodation in third year). I go home to a house of friends whom I inevitably will bump into, even if we’re all in a state of revision-riddled hysteria. When you’re living in a college where everywhere is a study space, and everyone is working, taking time for relaxation is much more difficult.

Colleges repudiate this and claim to encourage us to take time to care for our mental health, but this ‘lockdown’ mentality doesn’t really get us anywhere. Student welfare isn’t helped by restricting social activity. I don’t mean that we should let students go wild, hosting parties that go on all through the night, but why not give more space to low-key events, or make rooms available exclusively for breaks?

Students, however, should be at the forefront of such initiatives. Wolfson College’s latest move to implement an “extra consideration period” whilst permitting private hired events to continue is by no means the right way to go about it.

College-mandated quiet periods need reframing in their approaches; colleges must work harder to create a healthy environment that is quiet and productive but also relaxing and fun, rather than permitting their grounds to become a locus of stress and burnout for the sake of the Tompkins Table.