You might be a soon-to-be fresher, nervously scouring the websites of Cambridge student media for information about the place. Or you might be bumming around in the summer holidays before another year amongst the achingly beautiful honey-coloured stone of those ancient courts (or amongst buildings with all the aesthetic grandeur of a derelict car park in Swindon, if you’re at a hill college). Either way, you probably harbour the exciting suspicion that because this is, after all, the best and most prestigious university in the country, if not the world, what Frank Sinatra said about New York is also true of Cambridge: “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”

In that case, no need to agonise over how to climb the greasy pole of university-wide fame and status – here are a few easy ways to become the proverbial Big Name On Campus:

Get involved in the Union

They have a history of getting amazing speakers who wove webs of spellbinding rhetorical majesty as they improved the lot of the human race with the profundity of their Ciceronian oratory – Churchill, Nehru, Katie Price. And that’s while the list of Union Presidents includes such luminaries as J.M. Keynes and Arianna Huffington. Ignore the fact that ever since Clare Balding occupied the position in 1992 and went on to host "Wimbledon 2day", Union Presidents haven’t exactly gone on to take the citadels of global power by storm.

No, put that aside because – though the days of Keynes are long gone – mildly famous speakers still speak in the Thursday night debates (not always Peter Hitchens, although he does appear there an alarming amount). And whenever someone drops out and Hitchens is too busy with his latest Mail on Sunday diatribe to rent his gob out yet again, you can speak in them, too!

Just remember that it’s not debating, it’s “debating”. The thing schoolkids win trophies for. That means you get rid of any flair, wit or desire to actually persuade people that you’re right. You say either "right" or "ladies and gentlemen" at the end of literally every sentence – because that makes whatever you say really convincing. As for the main body of your speech, you just say “in this debate, I am going to say X, Y and Z”, followed by X, Y and Z, and rounded off with that ingenious conclusion, the trick up the sleeve of all the trophy-winning “competitive debaters”: “to summarise: X, Y, Z”. 

Get involved in CUCA 

Admittedly, Cambridge University Conservative Association only has about 10 active members these days. And admittedly, I consider my past membership of its committee to be only slightly less embarrassing than the time when I was fifteen, doing work experience at the local council with my granny’s best friend, who was in charge of customer services, and the two of us were walking down a corridor past several of her underlings and she suddenly went giggly and joked “I’ve got a toyboy”. But what CUCA lacks in popularity, it will give you back twice in notoriety. Once you’re promoting events all over Facebook and Twitter like “An Evening with Some Random Junior Minister in the Major Government Best Remembered for a 1995 Sex Scandal”, everyone will remember your name. You’ll be up there in the bright lights of Cambridge infamy – and as Oscar Wilde reminds us: “There is one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

Write for the Tab

You just write something as bitchy and vacuous and inane as this article, but ditch the beautiful prose style and add some spelling mistakes.

So there you are, it’s as easy as that. If your name isn’t on the Cambridge Walk of Fame within a few months, you’ll only have yourself to blame.