Cambridge perhaps furnishes its students with more labels than convention dictates. Inside our bubble, we are tagged by subject and college, by extra-curricular and curricular success. On the outside, we are pegged with that dreaded social slur: ‘Wow! You must be so clever!’ It seems that once you’ve signed your name in that big old book you have effectively resigned yourself to three years of tripos-theory (Science: hard. Humanities: doss) and a lifetime as the token egghead. To matriculate, to capitulate – the saying might go.

But why is it that as soon as we find out someone studies English or History, we throb with the injustice of contact hours? Why does ‘Nat-Sci’ prompt a wince and Geography a wink? What is la-di-da about the arts, and what is stale about the sciences? A similar set of questions might be posed about the college hierarchy – unspoken and yet widely understood. Or even about Cambridge itself – as Plutarch said, ‘Barba non facit philosophum’. In other words: just because I have a beard doesn’t mean I know all the answers to University Challenge.

What we have here is the Cambridge nervous system: a series of automatic reflexes that lead us to believe we ‘know’ things about people based on how far their college is from Sainsbury’s, or how many hours they sit in lecture halls, or the fact that they go there at all. We sniff out labels and arrange them neatly into piles, judging people on the basis of hearsay and generalisation – past and present. It begs the question: if Cambridge is supposedly a collection of the brightest minds, fostered by the best education, then why do we still fall victim to the ills of generalisation?

“Intelligence, for these women, is gendered. Etched into their bodies is the notion that their worth, as women, depends on their domestic and aesthetic prowess – from looking nice and keeping house”

In the basement of a mobile phone warehouse in central Faridabad, the site of a small women’s polytechnic university, this question was brought into sharp focus for me. As part of a women empowerment project in the summer of 2017, I travelled to India as a teacher-volunteer. Instructed by the centre’s supervisor to focus initial lessons on ‘personality development’, I found myself standing before a blackboard, chalking my finest stick-woman. Fourteen lines skewered her lonely figure – one label per student.

I waited for the first volunteer to put forward the first ‘personality-developing’ label. There was little response, so I began: I scraped ‘smart’ onto the board and fourteen sets of eyes stared blankly back at me. They told me that whilst they understood the meaning of ‘smart’, it was my application of it that they could not comprehend. A voice from the back delivered the blow: “Boys are smart; girls are beautiful.”

Was this aphorism not born of a belief system similar to that which produces statements like: ‘all John’s students are indulged’, or ‘all Cambridge students are elitist’. Is it not, however much we might not like to admit it, underpinned by similar structures of generalisation – of assumption? Intelligence, for these women, is gendered. Etched into their bodies is the notion that their worth, as women, depends on their domestic and aesthetic prowess – from looking nice and keeping house. They have been prescribed a standardised identity. Is such prescription not simply a gendered version of what we do to each other today? I began to wonder: why had I even labelled the figure in the first place? Was my impulse to label my stickwoman another cog in the wheel that had first churned out the offending statement? It was when I questioned the merit in skewering someone with words that ‘define’ them, that I began to understand the problem for what it really was – not an issue of labels but an issue of their imposition.

Labels can be positive, uniting people together in an empowering way. It is human nature to seek companionship in those we can relate to, and in those who understand us. It is a means by which we can better understand ourselves. Yes, if you are a boy you can be smart. Yes, if you are a girl you can be beautiful. And vice versa. The same follows for our Cambridge equivalents. There is nothing wrong with being what you are expected to be, it is simply important to remember that it is not what you have to be. The labels that you give yourself are touchstones, those that others impose are ceilings