when did you realise you couldn't cut it
I once lost the aphorisms competition at Trinity by quite a comfortable margin. I can't even recall a single one of my submissions — by my recollection, the quota was up to five per candidate — and, for what it's worth, I can't remember the entry by the winning entrant, either; a friend of mine now (when I last checked) pursuing graduate studies in chemistry at UC Berkeley, one of the best schools in the world. Maybe his terse and sardonic lyrical pirouettes were what got him in. More likely, though, was that he's good at chemistry.
I think this was one of the first moments, at least one of the first that's easily pinpointed, when I realised I truly couldn't cut it — not in this place, not right now, not anymore. I had been hanging onto this pretentious sense of dynamism and ability that others, I thought, lacked, especially on my cohort. I was miserably caught short when it came to my abilities on the physics, but, I told myself, I could spin a sentence and turn a phrase better than any of them, surely. After all, I had gotten 100% on my English GCSE when I was sixteen. Surely that had to count for something.
It turns out that most people at Cambridge can turn a phrase or spin a sentence. It also turns out that most of them, on balance of probability, can do it better than you 1. Turns out, additionally, that rather than being a fabulous, handsome jack-of-all-trades, you are actually more master-of-none, and not particularly handsome, and actually quite blotchy and short and out-of-shape, and therefore markedly below average on a number of very visible personal and academic axes which dictate life at places like this.
I think it's fair to say everyone enjoys a place more when they feel themselves above average. These places are, in a sense, "built for you" — except they are not, as there will always be better, brighter stars before and after you, no matter how brightly you shine, and from the perspective of an octogenarian Fellow who has spent most of the last Century holed up in the same wood-panelled set of Great Court, it does you no favours to over-invest in the last fad, the most recent "big thing", even if that big thing is a student, and come to think of it, I can't remember the practice of recruiting and taking on protégés ever catching on, although of course I would say that, wouldn't I, because after all I wasn't very good.
This is actually fallacious reasoning, and is a commonly reported cognitive bias, albeit in the opposite direction to what is most commonly demonstrated. Not everyone can be "above average", and, conversely, not everyone can be "below average". If you are in a certain cohort your a priori assumption is not that you are below or above average. Ergo it doesn't make any sense from a practical, statistical standpoint for me to argue that you, the reader, would automatically be below (or above, for that matter) average at Cambridge.↩