Every woman I know at Cambridge is short for time. Evenings are spent boiling quick-cook pasta before frantically trying to remember which formal, rehearsal, pub trip or hastily booked club night is starting in the next half hour. Whatever the dark recesses of Camfess try to tell you, we all have a lot of work, and those of us with fewer contact hours tend to masochistically fill the rest of them with extracurriculars in an effort to have some sort of social life.

“If you’re thin, people will assume you’re ‘disciplined’, even if it’s the result of a genetically fast metabolism or a particularly shitty break up”

So what’s always surprised me is the time it takes women at Cambridge to get ready in the morning. An amount of time most of us, frankly, don’t have. An amount of time that, as Week Five approaches, starts to feel just a little bit oppressive.

I never expected when I came here that I’d be making the forty-minute walk to the Grafton centre just to scour through the racks of The British Heart Foundation. I realised rather pathetically the other day that I’d started listening to History podcasts while I did my makeup, just to feel like I wasn’t wasting time. Maybe it’s a problem we’ve created for ourselves, maybe sometimes we really do enjoy the creativity of it, but often it can just feel like a chore.

For most of the women at Cambridge, being thought of as attractive isn’t the sun we orbit around – we wouldn’t be here if it was. But there’s a sense in which we’ve all assimilated, ever so slightly, ever so gradually, to the truism that if you’re a woman, being smart – even exceptionally so – doesn’t quite cut it.

If you’re thin, people will assume you’re ‘disciplined’, even if it’s the result of a genetically fast metabolism or a particularly shitty break up. If you spend a full hour putting on makeup, curling your hair and engineering a sixties-inspired outfit, people will assume you ‘have your life together’, even if you had to skim the compulsory reading as a result. None of the assumptions are true, but it’s what people think.

“For most of the women at Cambridge, being thought of as attractive isn’t the sun we orbit around”

The problem is, the notion that the amount of effort you put into your outfits must correlate to your degree efforts, just isn’t an assumption we make about men. The chaotically brilliant, eccentric genius is a role we’ve never been allowed to play. Instead, we got lumped with the studious try hard. Intellect in women is synonymous with organisation, punctuality, diligence. Overdressing can be empowering, sure, but power dressing was always aimed at women. Men just…had power.

The need to overdress has always been a need to overcompensate. For a perceived lack of talent or natural ability, usually. Men can be rough diamonds, ten minutes late with skewed glasses and messy hair, but we have to turn up polished, to sparkle just to be seen as bright. It’s not a coincidence that the rise of the ‘career woman’ in the eighties came with shoulder pads and stilettos.

This sort of performative gymnastics takes time. A lot of it. And yes, we can listen to History Hits while we put in our contact lenses but again, multitasking has been marketed to women as a uniquely female superpower, and for good reason. It’s exhausting. As a woman, it seems that messy is one of the most rebellious things we can be. As much as I love fashion, I don’t want it to be a byword for elegant, or chic, or perfect. If we keep allowing ourselves to be a bit messier, one day we might not need to power dress for people to think we’re competent. Maybe we’ll just… have power.