I go to Corpus. A petite, twee place really, as central as you like. My reasons for applying there were as uninspired as they come (the history dons do without admissions tests). Although I wasn’t aware of the glories of Corpus upon my arrival at matriculation, by the time I left for the winter vac, I was very pleased with where I’d ended up.

You can guess why. In a year group of eighty-three, I knew virtually everybody’s name by the second half of Michaelmas and had well over half of them saved in my contacts. With fewer people around, you’re less likely to be brushed off. People will take more time to get to know you, since there are only so many others to move on to. Since I was never very popular in previous schools, where I often felt cast adrift, it has been lovely to be part of a friendly community from the get-go. Why ask anyone to go to hall with me? The ideal, I told myself, was to be able to sit with anyone who just happened to be there - certainly anyone from my own year.

“Pretty much everyone has heard of the positives of the older, central colleges, together with the drawbacks of the newer, more distant ones”

Blah blah blah. Pretty much everyone has heard of the positives of the older, central colleges, together with the drawbacks of the newer, more distant ones. My experiences are, in this respect, unsurprisingly pleasant.

So, picture me, reader, around (of course) week five, on a jaunty stroll through the Sidgwick Site. Headphones in, blasting none other than Murder on the Dancefloor (I had watched Saltburn the night before), college scarf blowing in the wind, the sky deepening from pink to orange on a supremely aesthetic afternoon in late autumn. From this zenith – slaying on all levels – I will now present a tragic denouement, told in a series of unfortunate events.

Exhibit A. As I left Sidge, my phone pinged. I opened it onto the Corpus JCR Facebook page and found a post innocuous to the untrained eye, but hinting towards a piece of gossip about me I soon started to realise was making its way around Corpus.

Exhibit B. Later that same day, I entered the natty basement that is Corpus bar. In the corner was a group of people, all of whom I’d spoken to on several occasions recently and had gotten on really well with. And despite waving to them now, however, not one of them invited me over or even acknowledged my presence, although they were looking straight in my direction.

Exhibit C. As I sat in hall the next day, I overheard a conversation taking place on the table behind me, all participants with their backs turned. A snarky comment about how I dress was mentioned. Someone else - now that they were helpfully on the topic - jumped in to take the piss out of the sound of my voice. This exchange would have hurt a lot less had the two who made the comments not been in my room sharing tea and biscuits with me, just a few days earlier.

“The image I’d tried so hard to create during freshers’ – outgoing, friendly, approachable – seemed to be running away from me, driven by forces entirely beyond my control”

What exactly did these experiences teach me? It became obvious, later on in the term, that together with all the benefits of a small, tightly-knit college came an inordinate amount of cliquey-ness. Drama and gossip seemed to spread like wildfire. The image I’d tried so hard to create during freshers’ – outgoing, friendly, approachable – seemed to be running away from me, driven by forces entirely beyond my control.

By this point, most readers will be rolling their eyes at the naïveté of yours truly, for the intensely idealistic fresher that he is. Of course your first Michaelmas is a transient fever dream. Of course most people you’re ‘friendly’ with then won’t be your friends later. Friendliness and being friends are not the same thing, a distinction that any stint in an office will make abundantly clear. My disillusionment, which felt so strong in the moment, was in fact a near-universal experience.

Despite its universality, I think the causes behind this feeling of disappointment are amplified at colleges like Corpus. Before term began, I thought that, with fewer people, there would be a strong culture of socialising beyond college. It’d be so easy, after all, with us being so central! Instead, though, our cliquey-ness appears to be breeding a hermetic insularity. Whenever I mention my college to others across the university, they’ll often tell me they don’t know anyone else from there. And within the university-wide societies I’ve joined, people are disproportionately from the ‘hill’ colleges (and Homerton, weirdly enough – you guys are everywhere). Counter-intuitively, it seems like your college will be more outgoing the farther away from the centre it is!

None of this is to underplay the pressing disparities between colleges. Varsity has reported on the inconsistent funding Cambridge students receive - whether in the form of grants, bursaries or otherwise - depending on their college, as well as the staggering rent discrepancies across the university. These inequalities are real, and deserve every bit and more of the attention they receive. But there are less visible, under-discussed imbalances between colleges that cut the other way. If we can agree on one thing, it is that there is no monopoly on happiness in Cambridge.