Choosing a college took me a hideously long time. I didn’t actually realise that over ten days or so was particularly above average until I began asking friends and other acquaintances about how, exactly, they all made the same momentous self/life defining choice and found out it had taken them all more or less a matter of minutes. Their answers varied from the practical - "Emma was the only college with interview dates online and I was booking a holiday" - to the predictable - "free laundry" - the exasperated - "I actually applied to Jesus" - and then the downright painful and obnoxious - "I looked at the Tompkins table". Someone else told me it was fate ("Emma chooses you, you don’t choose Emma") but that seemed a pretty niche way of going about it.

Being a deeply indecisive person probably didn’t help my cause. Neither, come to think of it, did the fact that I never went to look around any of the colleges. I cancelled on the one open day I did book some twenty four hours in advance because I’d got the date wrong. This meant that my (obviously all important) search for a college was done entirely online. Some colleges were crossed off pretty quickly; John’s, for example, before I’d even really started. Churchill’s aggressive marketing - ‘Churchill. Be a part of it.’ - and the headache-inducing flickering numbers on the home page made it a pretty quick no. The starkness of Jesus’ red/black colour scheme screamed death/blood/unattractive emblem and so that narrowed it down just a little bit more. Magdalene’s, on the other hand, was kind of dull and nursing home-esque, so that was crossed off sharpish, too. Also they were also the last all-male college in Oxford or Cambridge to admit women, which is the kind of thing that wouldn’t really matter in itself, but the fact that the college flag was flown at half-mast and disgruntled male members of the college wore black armbands after the event kind of killed any remaining prospects of that being an option.

Someone a couple of years above at school had been pooled to a hill college and spent a considerable amount of time moaning about how far away/isolated/deprived she was. My next port of call was, as such, Google Maps. This led to a few more culls (every other hill college, Downing, Homerton, Selwyn, etc) and a couple of red circles on my list. At some point I realised that all-female colleges were still a thing, and so Newnham and Lucy Cavendish, already sporting question marks due to location, were marked as "not an option either". Other remaining colleges had what could be termed ‘convenience catches’; i.e. claiming to be central whilst shipping out students to the middle of nowhere, like Gonville and Caius which makes freshers live out by the Sidgwick site, or Tit Hall whose second years basically go to a hill college.

Sidney Sussex had, I thought, great potential, but after googling it some more I came across a remark (probably on the Student Room) that its only distinguishing feature was that it was opposite Sainsbury’s. This, I realised, was probably deeply untrue (don’t they have Oliver Cromwell’s head?) but it was off-putting enough for Sidney to go, too. King’s also got a red ring due to its promising location, but quick research via various peers and Google brought back horror stories of tourists and communists, albeit disagreement over which was worse.

Several sleepless nights later I discovered that Emmanuel has a free laundry service and apparently decent food. This, plus being opposite Wagamama, gave it the final bit of edge over Queen’s. I took the plunge and typed the ‘E’ into UCAS. A bit over a year later, though, I think it was probably a waste of time, at least for the most part. Free laundry is not bad but washing machines are actually quite straightforward, I’ve since realised. If anything I’ve been struck by how little actually distinguishes colleges – apart from location, perhaps – but then accommodation does change year on year. The college you’re at is, like a lot of things here, both banal and totally blown out of proportion. It’s ultimately pretty meaningless to almost everyone outside a 10 mile (if that) radius of King’s Parade.