Let’s try and construct the cheapest May Week possible. A non-drinking, non-smoking, non-doping girl, off to just one ball and maybe 3 nights out between now and graduation, and she already has a dress. Three hundred pounds, easily. But what of those here who, hand on heart, simply cannot afford to go to a single May Ball this week – there aren’t too many bursaries for those, as you may have guessed. The simple truth of the matter is that those who can afford May Week tend to forget about those who can’t.

When I arrived in Cambridge the biggest ‘political’ issue I was willing to sound off about to all who were unfortunate enough to listen was my disgust at the idea of public (read: private) schools.

The summer before applying, my school had kindly arranged for me to go on a week-long course at Eton College. I still remember walking around on the first day. I genuinely didn’t come from a bad school. But the idea of a ‘school’ that had its own chapel, squash courts, and swimming pool blew my mind.

And things being more black and white for me back then, I hated them. Really hated them.

I was a bright kid, and as interested and willing as any other. Why did public school boys get to enjoy such expansive opportunities while the likes of me didn’t? I was determined not to forget that when I came to Cambridge.

Three years on, I still believe the same things about class and social inequality as I did when I first arrived in Cambridge – not even an education at one of the privileged, and, it must be said, one of the best institutions in the world has ironed that out of me. What has changed, however, is my understanding of the role of the individual in perpetuating or altering these boundaries.

In short, I have come to the long overdue realization that all those floppy-haired, Jack Wills-wearing Blues, from whom I would recoil in horror when I first arrived, had no more say in their upbringing, or the school they went to, than I did. Perhaps then, if we actually want to erode the unfair distinctions of class and wealth, it would be better to think not so much in terms of a categorization between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, but rather about how people conduct themselves once they have been dealt their hand.

In other words, we should accept that different people have had different upbringings and concentrate on taking a long hard look at how willing we are as individuals to change things in the future. We need to think how we can personally avoid perpetuating the undue privileges that many of us have benefited from and consider how we can begin to oppose them, making sure that fewer members of the next generation suffer from being disadvantaged .

I do not mean to play bleeding hearts and make you feel guilty for the 300 pounds lavished on festivities that could have potentially provided a developing country in Africa with water for fifty, text books for twenty-four, ten buckets, five radios, four fully planted allotments, two teachers, and a goat – all courtesy of Oxfam.

My point is simply this: enjoy your May Week – but let’s make sure we seize the opportunity to ensure that the gross boundaries and inequalities that still remain, both within this university, and beyond, are less vivid in thirty years time. If they do remain, we will only have ourselves to blame.

Dave Smith