Deadlines are approaching, yet still seems far away. Week Five is past, but Bridgemas is still a teasing seven days away. Before we know it, undergraduates will be home again, yet the erratic metaphorical loading bar of termly progress still has a small distance left to travel.

For many students, the most intense period is over, and the final academic week of term represents a winding down – a time to consolidate and wrap up ends which were loosened in Freshers’, ignored in Week One and more or less totally forgotten by Week Two. Deadlines which in the heady, carefree days of October felt forever away now loom large on the horizon. Now is the winter of our diss content.

It’s easy to forget how the end of Michaelmas term feels for first years – the sensation that after the incomparable rush and intensity of a Cambridge term, you are thrust once again into home life, with its inevitable pleasures and frustrations.

At the beginning of the term, Varsity wrote in an editorial about Freshers’ Fair, and the feelings of FOMO it inevitably produces. For most undergraduates, quickly doing the maths can feel a little scary – to be a ninth (that’s 11.1 per cent recurring!) of the way through your degree already can make it feel like things are moving at a speed beyond your control. It must be even more striking for Master’s students (and CUSU sabbs).

Especially for those in their final year, it’s tempting to begin to constantly begin to produce signposts. You begin to make an unconscious note of every time you’re doing something for the last time – the last Michaelmas term, the final Bridgemas formal, the concluding episode of a two-year Cindies’ saga... you get the point. This can only increase the sense that Cambridge is running through your fingers – but it isn’t without any value.

The fast pace of term makes it difficult for us to relish our experiences, but it’s important to take stock at times like this, and realise that, clichéd as it sounds, it’s better to be happy things happened at all than to dwell too much on their disappearance. If you’re a final-year student lucky enough to have got tickets to a Bridgemas formal, don’t waste your time wallowing in self-pity because it will be your last – instead, take the time to celebrate an experience which you might never have again.