My experience taking Part III
Posted on: August 2025
Full of expectation and uncertainty, I arrived at the Cambridge train station on a sunny day in September. The challenges I knew lay ahead filled me with energy and motivation—challenges I had been warned about by fellow students and lecturers who had taken Part III before me, the one-year Master’s programme in Mathematics taught at the University of Cambridge, which, according to Wikipedia, and probably most people who have gone through it, is regarded as the hardest and most intensive mathematics course in the world.
For those who don’t know, the University of Cambridge is divided into colleges—smaller institutions, mostly independent of each other—that are to the University what a state is to a federation. As a student, you become a member of one of these colleges: you live, study, and eat (and drink) there. Some are old and grandiose, others are newer and slightly more humble-looking, like my beloved Hughes Hall. Even now, in hindsight, it’s hard to describe college life in words, but the closest I can come up with is the feeling you had as a kid going on a school trip—except the trip lasts an entire year, and there are no teachers to complain if you drink beer. Living in a college is an unforgettable experience, and Hughes Hall, being a college mostly consisting of one-year Master’s students, makes it all the more intense, all the more ephemeral. But, just like school trips, this one has to end too—and for me, it ended too soon.
You’re probably not reading this for me to tell you how lovely it is to live in Cambridge or how beautiful the architecture is. You probably want to hear about the course, so let me quickly wipe the tear off my keyboard and tell you what you came here for:
Is it the hardest course? Maybe—I couldn’t say for sure. Is it the most intense? I’d bet big money that it is. I struggle to believe there’s anything quite like it. The first two weeks are fine—you mostly cover material you’ve either seen during your bachelor’s degree or studied in advance over the summer to fill any gaps. But after that? The engines go full throttle, and they don’t stop—not until you hear “The exam is now over” in your very last paper.
There’s an immense variety of courses—far more than you could possibly master in a lifetime—and most people will examine on five of them, plus a written essay. The lectures are short, about fifty minutes, and, as I’ve said before, they’re quick. Really quick. Quoting one of my lecturers: “The lectures here are not for you to understand the material, but rather for you to know what to study at home.” And it couldn’t be more true. I would say I consistently understood less than 50% of a lecture. In hindsight, it’s probably more useful to follow my lecturer’s advice: go to lectures to listen, don’t copy anything, and just get a rough idea of what’s going on. You can understand it later.
The course is divided into three eight-week terms: Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter. Teaching happens only in the first two; the third is for revision and writing your essay, which is essentially a literature review of a modern research topic. Sixteen weeks doesn’t sound like much—and it isn’t. That’s part of the Cambridge experience. The courses are incredibly advanced and in-depth, far more so than most people (myself included) will have seen during their bachelor’s.
During my undergrad, one of my lecturers told me something that rings very true: “A term in Part III is like driving at very high speed and then having a car crash at the end. Christmas and Easter holidays are the time to fix this car crash.” In plain English: it’s no surprise if you fall behind and delegate certain chapters to the holidays (beware of this!). I did this—responsibly, I thought—and ended up going into exams betting that entire chapters wouldn’t come up, simply because I never had the time to study them.
Of course, sixteen weeks of teaching does leave a lot of “free” time—and the course is structured that way for a reason. I’d say that for every hour of lecture, I spent three to four hours in the library working through proofs and examples. Overall, I easily spent more than fifty hours a week studying, Saturdays and Sundays included. It gets rough—especially keeping up that “full-throttle” pace.
Other than a fortnightly “example class” (where homework solutions are discussed), you get little to no formal support on the material. Although this might seem like a drawback, in hindsight it forces you to develop serious self-learning and collaboration skills. If I had to give one single piece of advice: find people taking the same courses as you, meet regularly, dissect the proofs, and explain problems to each other. Don’t be afraid to expose your weaknesses—your peers will help you, and you’ll help them. Without a doubt, this was what helped me push through the darkest days of Part III.
Because make no mistake—there will be dark days. Part III isn’t a test to see if you’re a genius (even if it sometimes feels like it); it’s a test of self-organisation and, above all, perseverance. More than once, I called my parents on the verge of tears because of the course’s intensity. More than once, in full-blown tears, I sat in my room wondering if I could push through.
But you do. You push through. And on graduation day, dressed in white tie, you’ll stand in the same city where you arrived a year earlier—with the same uncertainty you felt at the start and the same urge to cry you felt during those dark nights. And you’ll realise what Cambridge was truly about: the late nights in the library, but also the late nights at the pub; the suffering, but also the joy; the hardships, and overcoming them; and, above all, the people—the ones who shared your struggle and left a permanent mark on your heart. That’s what Cambridge was about.
Would I do it again? Abso-fucking-lutely.