Every Week of Term, Ranked Best to Worst

Raymond is here to give you more numbers to deal with the current numbers of weeks

Number 9: Week 4

Week 5 gets all of the credit for pushing students to the brink, but really it’s Week 4- the nail-biting, stomach-churning, anxiety-written advent to Week 5- that has us all scrambling to bar to procrastinate, spend money on things we don’t need and sit at brunch for 3 hours instead of the socially acceptable 30 minutes hoping our dissertations will write themselves and that our supervisors will simply forget our existence. And who really does work on a Sunday, anyway?

Number 8: Week 2

By now, the realisation has sunk in that none of your ambitious resolutions for the term have panned outyes, you resolved to go to the UL every morning at 9 and study for 12 hours until close. Sure, you promised you’d do all supervision work the day it was set and colour code your binders. But Cambridge is like, hard, and by week 2 it really only takes the promise of a supervision later in the day to ruin you. Hopes up, though. We get a degree at the end (allegedly).

Number 7: Week 5

The worst part about Week 5 is the way everyone references it in emails. I swear to God- every Week 5, my inbox is crammed with newsletters from societies I don’t remember joining, and the TCSU members always make some crack about wEeK fIvE blUeS in the hope that it’ll distract us from the fact that none of us voted for them and we all resent them for being better liked by our peers than we are. That said, Week 5 is plenty terrible on its own. Every day is a deadline, essentially. All of your friends have disappeared. It’s usually around this time that you’ll find your entire friendship group has miraculously changed and you don’t speak to anyone you were tight with in Week 1.

Number 6: Week 1

The brimming excitement that accompanies the beginning of a new term. The promise, finally, of greatness. Of success. Sure: last term was the most academically disastrous eight weeks of your life, but none of that matters now. New lectures, new topics. Forget everything from last term- write it off and just ace the new material. It’ll be easy.

Number 5: Week 3

The adrenaline of term has finally counteracted the slump of Week 2. You’re finally back at the library. People actually ask you to hang out with them instead of the other way round. Your friends voluntarily suggest trips to the College Bar. John Summers is hosting dessert nights. Things aren’t perfect, but they’re not bad, either.

Number 4: Week 6

The term has peaked and we’re on the awkward come-down, like the morning after a party with Bret Easton Ellis in 1992 when you wake up in Century City despite starting the night in Pasadena. Indeed, Week 6 is much like an Ellis novel: chaotic, confused, and full of character. Even if you missed every deadline there was, it matters no longer. Things are almost over.

Number 3: Week 7

Nothing matters anymore. Literally. Nothing. Matters. You have goodwill from this term. Your work was on time. Just take a week off- separately make some excuse to all of your supervisors. Push everything back to Week 0 of next term. You can feel the hype, the buzz, of Week 8 just over the hill. Unless you’re a NatSci which means you’re probably stuck at the lab doing a presentation on lasers or something like I did last term. Everyone else is happy, however.

Number 2: Week 0

You’re goddamn right. No work, at least not yet. You can still spend all day reading and meticulously folding your socks, revelling in the fact that your room is freshly cleaned and the linen on your bed is finely pressed. Your room, an inviting chrysalis of warmth and ambition, from which you will burst forth at year’s end, topping class lists and making your mother proud. Just you wait. This term will be…

Number 1: Week 8

You may have met some people who claim to “love” Trinity and never want to leave. The clinical term for these people used to be “sociopaths” until 1968. Most of us are ecstatic at the promise of returning home, where you’ll smoke cigarettes at the poorly-lit transom of the local Wetherspoons, reminiscing on old times. You’ll make polite conversation with your family, drive aimlessly around in your car, desperately clutching onto what’s left of your fast evaporating feelings of youth and innocence. Make the most of it; after all, you’ll be back in six weeks.