Camfess, the anonynmous Facebook confession page, has made a name for itself in deadline procrastination. There are many influencers who base their platforms around teaching their viewers how to study “like a Cambridge student,” but they all seem to overlook this crucial element of day-to-day student life.

It’s also a crucial space for any Cambridge student, a vortex into which we shout out our preoccupations, and a platform for both debate and advice. Taking a scroll through Camfess reveals everything from our primary sources of worry and the general political climate to students’ sense of humour.

Before the dawn of the internet, students could find all this and more the in letters segment of Varsity. The parallel between the two is quite striking, with, for example, instances of ADC drama (pun unintended), being a shared feature, like this hot take from the April 2001 issue: “Reviews which are merely based on subjective ‘bitching’ rather than objective reviewing do not contribute to the arts.”

You can also find students heroically speaking up about the most pressing matters in the name of the Cambridge community, like one outraged English student who wondered: “Does anyone else see this subsidy to the mathmos as unfounded and indefensible?” A bit of context: he was extremely concerned by the UL scones being 50p more expensive than the Maths Library ones.

“Before Camfess existed the space for all this was right here, on Varsity!”

A personal favourite of mine is the debaucle caused by an article titled “Mapped out,” which made the front page of the January 2004 issue. In a letter titled ‘Geographers throw their crayons about’, an angry group of first year geographers claimed to have been falsely labeled a “minority subject” and that the “implication that Geography revolves around colouring in maps” was “an insult to their intelligence”. In the following issue, another letter urged geographers to “GET A GRIP PEOPLE” and “wise up and stop whinging,” a messaged he delivered through a metaphorical “nice big crayola marker”. If this debate doesn’t sound straight out of Camfess, I don’t know what does.

Crucially, having the arguments we’re having on Camfess in a newspaper forced people to take accountability for their stance. It stopped them from hiding behind anonymity instead of owning up to or thinking longer before submitting their questionable takes.

Perhaps the pompous writing in the letters makes them a little easier to differentiate, but the content mostly remains the same. Whatever the format, public complaints seem to paint the most accurate picture of what our past and present university experience is like.

Hence why the following mantra from November 2000 still rings true: “When writing letters to Varsity can you ask yourself. Am I making this up? Did it really happen?”