Your Cambridge computer accounts
Students leaving the University
When you finish your course
Exact dates for the cancellation of student accounts will be published on the UCS News Service and notified by email to all those concerned. The information below gives the general timetable, and some other advice on what to do before you leave.
On or shortly after the dates given, all computing accounts belonging to students concerned will be cancelled on Desktop Services, Hermes, Raven and VPDN. The students concerned will be notified by email. Those who have applied to continue to a further degree will receive a message confirming that we are aware of their application and that accounts will not be cancelled, as long as the application is live at the cancellation date.
Students cannot keep their University computing accounts after the cancellation date; the University’s email forwarding service for alumni, managed jointly by the Development Office and Aluminati Network Group Ltd, may be of interest. See http://cantab.net/ for details. A further facility for change of address auto-replies from cancelled @cam accounts is under development, and information will be circulated with the cancellation warnings.
Cancellation schedule
Undergraduates following two (affiliated), three or four year courses, Clinical Medical, Clinical Veterinary, Part 3 mathematics and LLM students are normally cancelled two weeks after the June graduation ceremony, unless continuing immediately to a further degree. Students will be warned by email at least four weeks before the cancellation date, giving an opportunity to correct the information supplied to us by the University's Student Information System, CamSIS, for instance if planning to continue to a further course. A small number of late-finishing undergraduates are cancelled in mid August.
Short term undergraduate students following courses of a year or less will normally be included in the main undergraduate purge, but may be cancelled earlier if their course lasts for a single term. Students will be contacted by email before cancellation.
Computing accounts will be cancelled when students permanently discontinue their degree, following a warning email. Students who are intermitting or discontinuing on a temporary basis will normally be allowed to keep their accounts, with the agreement of their College.
Taught course postgraduate students who are following one year courses that finish by the end of July will have their accounts cancelled in mid August, unless continuing to a further degree. Students will be warned by email in late May and will be given an opportunity to tell us if they are planning to continue to another course. Students whose courses finish after August 1st are cancelled in the Michaelmas term; again, a warning email will be sent.
Research students and other postgraduate students are included in regular, monthly cancellation runs as they complete their degree. Email is normally sent a month before the cancellation date.
Before you leave
If you are not intending to return to Cambridge next year, please clear your filespace(s) before the dates given, first ensuring that you have copies of any files you want to keep. Also, if you have subscribed to any mailing lists, please remember to cancel the subscription before you leave.
If you will have another email address after you leave the University (for instance the cantab.net forwarding service for alumni), you are advised to set up your new account and notify your regular correspondents of your change of address soon. You may forward mail from your Cambridge account to your new account, but this will only work until the Cambridge account is cancelled. It is regretted that mail cannot be forwarded after accounts are closed.
You may also wish to copy files from DS-Filestore to take away, onto a USB stick or by file transfer to another system.
University Society computing resources
Please remember to arrange to transfer ownership of any society resources to the person who will be looking after them in the next academic year. See http://www.cam.ac.uk/about/socinfo/ for instructions.
Information for alumni
To make sure that you receive CAM, the University's alumni magazine, when you leave Cambridge please visit http://my.alumni.cam.ac.uk/ and register your details. You will also find information on the Alumni Travel Programme, the Alumni Weekend and other benefits available to alumni on the same web site.
If you are staying in Cambridge
If you are going to be away during the summer vacation, please unsubscribe or suspend mail from mailing lists; see Information Sheet IS12: Hermes Email: Forwarding (redirection) and vacation messages. You may also like to consult IS13: Reading and sending email when away from Cambridge, and see information on being away from Cambridge, which describes other actions you should consider taking before you leave Cambridge for the summer.
If you expect to return to the University in October but are not on our list of continuing students (and therefore receive a message warning you about cancellation), then when you receive the message about cancellation, please fill in the web form at the appropriate page, according to whether you: