My mother always told me ‘If a boy doesn’t like you, it is only because he is intimidated by your beauty.’ She also said ‘From some angles, you look like Ringo Starr’ so my resultant self-esteem is muddled.

I vacillate between Fonz-like levels of self-belief, pausing in front of shop windows to say ‘Looking fiiine’ in my head at my reflection, to shutting myself in the wardrobe with a sack of comfort marshmallows, quivering with indignation at the nasty business of being a functional human. What doesn’t make the process of ricocheting madly between essay scrambles, boy entrapping and future ensuring any easier on my crumbly psyche is the presence of people who just Do It Better. Those mythical undergrads who walk among us, but are not like us.

Some students are Chosen Ones because of the genetic dice-throw which has blessed them with physical perfection. When they walk around the place, they make it look like the set of a hazily shot BBC adaptation – their cheekbones flush delicately in the wintry air, their hair is dishevelled in a way that makes even serious-minded bluestockings like me giggle unreservedly and walk, lust-dazed, into lampposts.

Our attendance at a high-ranked university takes much of the sting out of accusations of superficiality as well – yes, you’re tormented with desire for an ivory-skinned, raven-haired Swedish supermodel/goddess hybrid – but it’s OK, even quite nobly motivated, because she’s got a double first in SPS. You can talk to her about Karl Popper, so it’s fine. Of course, you don’t want to talk to her about anything, you just want to make sweet love to her in front of the chronophage, but the point is, you could. To be honest, I’m not that envious of the absurdly beautiful. Being advantaged by looks is so far out of the realm of my experience that I don’t really mind when others are. No, I reserve my hatred for other breeds of student wunderkind. 

My aims in life are to 1) Not end the day passed out in the ground floor bathroom with that mysterious chin injury (again) and then 2) Is entirely dependent on circumstance. Sometimes it is to finish an essay, sometimes to write an e-mail to father which makes him simultaneously proud of me, disinclined to come visit and likely to send a blank cheque. But essentially at the very most I look a week ahead, and I am continuously puzzled by those who seem to have had life plans handed out to them very early on and be following them with ease.

First there are those who excel academically – who manage their time, i.e. don’t detour to Topshop on the way to the English Faculty to look at a Christopher Kane dress, and who write first class essays tying Aeschylus, The Sopranos and Chaos Theory into a charmingly witty conclusion, while I’m still struggling to remember whether Paradise Lost has a happy ending. 

The other variety of student prodigy are the ambitious bastards, the ones that edit the newspapers, write the late-shows, play in concerts and generally demonstrate that it is perfectly feasible to do a degree while retaining a life outside it. All in all it makes it much trickier for me (though I do manage every week) to insist that I can’t possibly finish my dissertation draft as I’m rushed off my feet with weeping gently into my Cath Kidston quilt. However, I acknowledge that human variety is essential to prevent collective insanity. I remember a teacher picking silent infant me from the class (though it could have been any pathologically shy child to make her point) and snapping ‘Why can’t you all behave a little bit more like Victoria?’ Even at the age of four I knew she’d picked a losing horse. A class full of me would have been a room of hiccupping freaks with their hair in their eyes, hiding under bean bags in the quiet area to read Hilaire Belloc.

Roughly the same principle works here; I may find some university high-flyers arrogant and abrasive, but I acknowledge that people who actually have life aims, make substantial efforts and are driven by more than just the thought of their mid-afternoon pink wafer biscuit is important, and might even spur me on to think, I don’t know, a fortnight ahead for once.