Exam term is very hard to deal with. Finals are especially hard, for obvious reasons; and first year exams are daunting for terrified freshers. There are several ways of dealing with that. The best way is obviously the clichéd one: to get steadily through revision by day and then to relax (without drinking) in the evening. Maybe some people take up meditation or yoga or whatever. I imagine that’s a sensible thing to do and that it works very well – but I don’t really know because I am not at all sensible. My instinctive response to my first Cambridge exams was to constantly fantasise about legging it to Heathrow, flying to America and bombing across the country in a 1950s convertible, on drugs constantly, and writing about it, like the twenty-first century’s answer to Jack Kerouac.

In reality, what I did was only marginally less sensible: I worked from 5 am to 1 am, every day. In lieu of the sleep on which I was seriously missing out, I took a veritable shitload of those little white pills ProPlus. I not sure there’s anything particularly wrong about ProPlus specifically – maybe it’s just caffeine pills that have this effect, maybe it’s just caffeine. But to start with I really enjoyed it; I was smashing through revision, concentrating brilliantly, full of energy, really wired – in the sense of feeling totally plugged in to everything. Through most of my exams, I needed more and more of those little white givers of life to sustain myself. If I stopped taking the ProPlus, I felt I would have collapsed psychologically. All my success thus far, that magnificent feeling of being able to power through tons of work, to ram multitudinous thoughts into my head over the course of library sessions stretching from dawn till well into the depths of the night, was all contingent on me continuing to take the pills. I thought, as Hunter S. Thompson famously put it in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “we can’t stop now, we’re in bat country.”

However, after this honeymoon between me and ProPlus, things went downhill. I sank like a meteor careering towards earth – and had a similar landing. It was my last exam. To start with I was writing incredibly fast, pouring my thoughts out of my pen at a demonic speed, with the mental acuity to simultaneously think about getting into a wild Dionysian state of drunken abandon afterwards. Then when I contemplated the fag end of a drunken night and the possibility of the big sleep to come, a silicon chip inside my head was switched to cause a torrent of sleep-inducing chemicals to gush through my brain. I fell asleep at my desk. I don’t remember falling asleep that well, it just happened – my body had no choice except to surrender to its embrace. I was woken up by the chief invigilator informing us that it was the end of the exam. My results were 70, 73, 75, 42.

As Michaelmas term descends into Week 5, the stressful nature of Cambridge is foremost in people’s minds. We’re clever people and we want to do well, and all this can often make people seriously anxious. There are a lot of articles in student media saying that basically this is all horrible and we need to remember to chill. Sometimes I think they’re wishy-washy and angrily wonder as Tony Soprano did in the unsurpassably good TV series The Sopranos: “Whatever the fuck happened to Gary Cooper – the strong, silent type?” But these people are right. I was an idiot to want exam success so much that I seriously damaged my mental health, fell asleep in my last exam and ergo performed abominably in it.

For Finals I will definitely work in a steady, sensible, balanced way and probably take up yoga. It’s a boring thing to say and a boring thing to do. But sometimes being boring in Cambridge is just what works best.