It’s 12:30pm. You get up, watch a couple of old episodes of Parks and Recreation, and head out into college; it’s alright, you can come back to it later. You’re feeling a bit hungover today, so naturally you’re not going to open a book.

You pass the completely empty library (it’s always empty on a Thursday nowadays), and catch up with one of your friends at the bar.

“I haven’t done any work today”, they tell you. However, they really mean it. It’s not just a blanket statement used to cover up the hours of time they’ve been sweating over textbooks with a feigned air of coolness. They haven’t done any work. No one has.

We’ve dropped below Durham on the League Table. Student satisfaction is absolutely through the roof, but admittedly our research is flagging behind. It doesn’t matter, though, we can probably afford to ride it out for another decade or so on the back of our former prestige. Even the Mathmos have started socialising. Everything has changed since the student body rose up and unanimously agreed to do less work.

By ubiquitously lowering standards, and abandoning our strong work ethics, we have enabled a generation of students with more free time than ever to indulge in unproductiveness, and revel in our terrible nightlife.

You head out to a paired supervision. These are awkward now that the partner that you used to rely on to help you out, confident that they will have done the reading, no longer exists. Group classes are noticeably unstructured without that one student who has done an unnecessary amount of extra reading. Individual supervisions are now a travesty that doesn’t even bear thinking about. Gone is that person in your subject group who had their life together to the most worrying extent, working all the time, going on the Faculty Reading List, and consistently being more productive than you.

Obviously, you can’t all see this, but I’m currently looking across at the student that this refers to right now as I’m writing, feeling slightly hostile. They’ve given up; you now have all the freedom you ever wanted, and none of the guilt for not working. You’ve got an exciting event on every night this week. There are so many fantastic plays, debates and and speaker events on all the time in Cambridge, and you have an embarrassing amount of free time every day. Why wouldn’t you go to all of them? That’s what everyone else will be doing.Your failure to produce an essay this week will only be a drop in a much larger ocean of complacency and under-performance.

The examinations system has been stretched and strained to its very limit. They can’t, surely, give us all a 2:2, can they? Would that not look worse on the university?

The examiners desperately try to mark our scripts, pitted against a cohort of students who have all spent a shameful amount of time googling images of ugly buildings across Eastern Europe, and trying to find the worst dressed 90s boy bands. The long-term prospects of Cambridge are starting to look slightly apocalyptic.

You open your bleary eyes, slouched over the desk in your room, considering whether the paint fumes coming off your wall are encouraging some of the vivid dreams you’ve been having.

You have an essay deadline in two hours.

F**k’s sake.