Happy A-level results day to all prospective Cambridge students. At long last, your suffering is at an end.

I never got to have an A-level results day, thanks to Covid. All I got was a five-minute Zoom call, so I’m not quite sure what an in-person one is like.

I like to imagine it’s like movie college graduations where they hurl silly square hats into the air, except that when the hats come down they have grades magically written on the top in letters of fire. As the hats descend, there are wails of ecstasy, disbelief, pain and humiliation.

One of the ecstatic students is the classic Cambridge overachiever, dark circles etched under their eyes. Their mothers had miniscule pianos surgically inserted into their wombs so that their foetus would become a prodigy before birth. They spoke three languages by the age of three and 14 languages by the age of 14. The length and stamina of their study sessions gave the lo-fi girl a run for her money. They spent their nights imagining the superbly intellectual conversations they would at last get to experience at Cambridge. “You’re a fan of the Poincaré conjecture too? I thought I was the only one!”

Cambridge student ‘stunned’ to learn that she is, in fact, one of the elite

For these people, arriving at Cambridge is a dream come true, until they walk up to a random person, ask about their results and hear: “Oh, six A*s, and they shut down every EPQ in the country because none of them could be as good as mine.”

The pro of getting into Cambridge for the overachiever: everyone is just like them. The con: everyone is just like them.

Nearby, we see another student raising their eyebrows in surprise as they catch their hat. They’d been chill; they didn’t see the hardworking lo-fi girl as a competitor. But here are A*s where they’d expected Bs or Cs. They’d thought their uni experience would involve going out on the piss in Sheffield, but now it looks more like after-dinner drinks and nibbles with a future UN secretary-general.

Fresher feeling ‘confident’ about high school relationship going long distance

Then there’s the closeted queer, from a town where the gay bar closed in 1892 and the people take a “traditional” view of gender roles. For them, Cambridge is a radiant Love, Simon-esque paradise; the three A*s on the A-level hat a key to love, anti-heteronormativity, and wearing slay fits to the lecture hall. When they get here, even the closeted Phoebe Bridgers stans look happy. At least until they head out to their very first queer night only to find a drag queen trying to lip sync to “Cotton Eye Joe”. Well, no one ever said being queer in Cambridge was easy.

There are also disappointed faces, of course. One of these students gives into temptation and prints out a fake certificate with mythical A*s and “We didn’t just make these up” printed at the top, to stall their hopeful parents. At the parents’ insistence, they even email Cambridge with the fake certificate accepting their “offer”. As luck would have it, no Cambridge staff member ever reads beyond the subject line of their emails, and the student soon receives an reply cordially inviting them to the “bridge”.

Another disappointed student was an overachiever, but unsuccessful. The magical hat brought only pain. All those carefully crafted humblebrags, wasted. As the five stages of grief are experienced the overachiever resolves to GET INTO CAMBRIDGE. Over the next year, they’ll try retaking A-levels, bulking out CVs and pretending to be at Cambridge by commenting on Camfesses. In the end, this can end only in one of two ways. The mature way where they accept that their self-worth is not determined by their university. Or the one where they don’t.

Rugby Blues hit back at Eddie Jones after the coach’s claim that private schools produce ‘mentally weak’ players. ‘No other institution prepares students for the level of bigotry or misogyny we expect here,’ one player said

Finally, there’s the person who’s confident about their results (because they cheated on their exams). There’s lots of possible methods, most involving outsourcing to long-suffering family tutors. The invigilator looks the other way due to bribery, or inebriation. Everyone wins, except the nation as a whole.

This person has never known uncertainty. Exams, poems, internship applications, even finger-painting as a five-year-old, were all outsourced for them. All is well until the Confident Student arrives at Cambridge and a book is set before them. They frown, and look around for their assistant, but none appears. They squint at the squiggles written on the page and try not to panic. “Why don’t you read out that passage, Rupert,” says the convenor. The Confident Student gulps. You see, finger-painting wasn’t the only First Year skill they’d had outsourced for them. They are Rupert, 19, and they never learned how to read.