Us humanities students with STEM friends – or with particularly career-minded friends of any kind – will know the pain of having a flatmate smugly hint to you that they will be earning eight thousand pounds at a tech firm over summer whilst you stack shelves at Tesco again. So when McKinsey, arguably Cambridge’s most name-dropped management consultancy firm, gift-wrapped me a targeted ad on Instagram for an “LGBTQ+ leaders’ event” in London, I snapped under the pressure and signed up.

I’ve never considered a career in consulting. It’s not that, like everyone else, I have no idea what it is; I’ve just always assumed that more ‘sciency’ firms aren’t interested in English students. But with third year job applications looming, I thought that there couldn’t be any harm in doing some market research. I was totally going only as a social experiment anyway. The dress code was ‘business casual’. “What’s business casual?” I asked a friend. “A nice shirt and no tie”, she said. “And don’t wear your college puffer”.

“My motivation? A crippling sense of what we could call ‘Business Casual Anxiety’”

Back at the end of Michaelmas, I invested in a wool coat from T.K Maxx. I had spent all term wobbling over whether to invest and ditch my bright red raincoat and now-apparently-embarrassing college puffer. My motivation? A crippling sense of what we could call ’Business Casual Anxiety’ - the fear that the way I act and dress might affect how people see me from a social, academic, or employability standpoint. Once I’d finally bought the coat, it’s true that I felt more powerful, and somehow more included. I’d lock eyes with other Sidgwick Law/Economics/six-figure-salary-aspiring girlbosses in identical coats. The coats were everywhere; long, dark blue or black, woollen with double-breasted buttons. Perfect for business casual. Before I left for the McKinsey leaders’ evening, I slapped a rainbow enamel pin on it for good measure; my official corporate queer ID.

At McKinsey, I hung my coat up on a rack of very similar coats and spent the next two-and-a-half hours being seduced by ‘the Firm’. The people, all members of McKinsey’s ‘GLAM’ (they’re changing the name) community, were predictably nice, interesting and relaxed. Conversations with other attendees—in full-throttle network mode—tended to last around three minutes. Those of us who were students quickly gravitated towards one another and began neurotically comparing summer plans. I spoke to one guy who’d flown all the way from Dublin to pursue that mythical internship.

Making liberal use of the free alcohol to get rid of my nervous energy, I stayed longer than I’d initially planned. I realized that I’d have to rush if I was going to get the fast train back to Cambridge. Slightly light-headed with relief that I hadn’t made a fool of myself, I made a dash for it, grabbing my coat on the way out and half-jogging to the Tube station.

“I felt weirdly upset that McKinsey, a company I’d said I had no interest in ever working for, might think badly of me”

At least, I thought I’d grabbed my coat. What I’d actually grabbed, as I realized only when I reached King’s Cross Station, was a disturbingly similar coat belonging to another corporate wannabe. In my rush, I’d also stolen their wallet and keys.

I rushed back, feeling silly and absurdly convinced that they’d probably called the police. I was lucky; the coat’s owner was waiting outside, wearing my coat, and I swapped and grovelled appropriately. Walking away, I felt weirdly upset that McKinsey, a company I’d said I had no interest in ever working for, might think badly of me.

There’s something strange and demonic about Cambridge—the mood that overtakes me when I’m here. Seeing other people getting work experience, internships, and holding top positions in university societies, makes me feel the desire to be doing those things, even if they’re not for me. It makes me want to pursue exciting and well-paying, but completely unsuited jobs, like work for a consultancy firm. This extends into my Cambridge social life, and it is completely self-imposed. But I don’t think anyone else cares whether I’m wearing a bright red coat or a dark blue one.

I should probably turn that into a bedazzled ‘Camfirmation’ and stick it on my wall, because I’ll need to repeat it a lot more to internalise it. Often though, these helpful reminders can come from spending an evening with friends who’ll snap you out of your inadequacy and remind you that the best social interactions aren’t the networking ones. After all, you can’t drink beer on LinkedIn.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition and nothing wrong with gaining experience. Summer internships, if you can get them, are great. But approaching success (either at university or after it) without prioritising what you want for yourself – rather than what you think you should want – won’t be fulfilling. It’s that reminder that I took away from the McKinsey evening. Along with someone else’s coat.