As the end of term approaches, have you flicked back through your diary? If you’re a fresher, it’s probably full of things you never would have foreseen being there or missing things you expected to. I, for one, have certainly found that. I did not envisage myself sitting in my kitchen in the Dark Peak at 2.30 on a late November Friday afternoon with no prospect of student fun in the near future. Since I degraded I’ve been desperately cramming doctor’s appointments in the gaps left between scribbled-out lectures on Giotto and Almódovar that I never made it to and distracting myself from the visits from friends that never made it into fruition by prancing around gym classes and learning Pilates. It’s not so bad, because it reminded me not only that you simply can’t plan life so far ahead (note to self, in future, write such things in pencil until they’re certain), but that the world will decidedly not end if Plan A doesn’t work out. In fact, if it eludes you, you almost always have time to form Plan B.

Whilst it’s good to have a dream and a goal, they have to be put in perspective. And what Cambridge is, ultimately, is a city of dreams. It’s a university full of reveries so elaborate and ambitious that it’s inevitable that sometimes they fall short of expectations. Not all budding ‘thesps’ will make it into Footlights, and, nevertheless, the next Fry, Thomson or Laurie is not necessarily amongst us. I know it isn’t, God forbid, Oxford (do you like the faux hatred I acquired along with my University Card?), but there are those who arrive with the ‘Brideshead’ image imprinted on their mind’s eye. There are those who, like myself, came with elegant, Pashley-style bikes, wearing satchels and aspiring, by virtue of their new university’s name, to be more intellectual than they really are. It’s as absurd as Kelly Holmes pushing her trolley around Sainsbury’s with her two Olympic gold medals clanging around her neck or a surgeon turning over the sausages and bacon for Sunday brunch with forceps to suggest that students in Cambridge have no lives outside the library, even if it does sometimes feel that way.  Similarly, whilst it won’t be a smooth ride, one in which every essay we read inspires our intellectual curiosity, every supervisor will not breath fire and contradict our every statement.  But just as you adjust your life to the real pace of life here, it’s time to return home.

It’s too easy to forget the expectations of the world outside, one in which Christmas is celebrated at the end, and not at the start, of December. In the outside world ‘the Senate House’ conjures up images of Ancient Rome and King’s College Chapel is where an internationally renowned annual carol concert is held, not a building you can see through your bedroom window. It’s a world where most people live in the blissful belief that ‘Hermes’ is mythical, and there’s bigger news than Sainsbury’s running out of £4 wine. More than that, it’s a world which, by reminding you of conventional perspectives, should restore your faith in yourself and in your dreams. But why should it do that? Not only because you will finally see beyond the confines of your faculty library for longer than 12 hours and will finally be able to escape the swarms of DSLR-bearing Japanese tourists, but because you have successfully completed one, four, seven, or more terms here. That achievement is something that instantly gains respect, and (time for you to pat yourself on the back here) quite rightly so. But of course we soldier on, not only because it’s a truth universally acknowledged that the man in possession of the job you want must be in want of a Cambridge (post)graduate, but because we are driven by our dreams.