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When I started at university, I was a girl on a mission. I had nearly died from the eating disorder I battled throughout my teens, and I had fallen several years behind my classmates from school. So when I finally did get my chance at university, I absolutely burned for success. I wasn’t interested in making friends. I wasn’t interested in the “college experience.” I wasn’t interested in romance, nightlife, or drinking.

No. I was there to lock in, lock down, and become the consummate student and scholar. And that is, in fact, exactly what I did.

My investment in myself as an undergraduate ended up compounding and yielding results I can only describe as top 1%. I came first in my year. I was accepted at both Oxford and Cambridge for a Master’s and a PhD. I won dozens of scholarships, secured fiercely competitive research council funding, and was eventually invited to join the Royal Society of Arts as a Fellow.

So here are my seven big secrets behind being in the top 1% of all students.

1. Know your “why” and reverse-engineer how to get there

To succeed at university, you have to know exactly what you want out of it. For so many people, university is just another step in life’s ploddy little formula, not something they consciously question or feel any need to justify. It sounds implausible, but within a few months of starting my undergraduate degree, I knew I wanted to do a PhD on Kant at Cambridge, with a year at Oxford in between. And that is, eventually, precisely what I did.

Even though these turned out to be my actual goals, what mattered was that they could serve as regulative ideals, organising my behaviour and habits in the here-and-now so that, whatever I ended up wanting later, I had already laid the stepping stones of my success.

As far as core academic achievements were concerned, I developed a unique and, it turns out, failsafe method for writing first-class degree essays. It produced the 16 first-class papers I achieved as an undergraduate, and my Distinction at Oxford. If I were still writing university essays today, this would remain my favoured technique.

2. Stay in your lane, and be prepared to be profoundly disliked

When you start doing well in your studies, there will be people around you who, if you let them, could steer you off track and psyche you out with their unhinged, almost radioactive insecurity.

The way I see it, these people are akin to volatility in the stock market. If you already know your goal is to stay invested for the duration, you cannot let the instability of others carry you off course. Whenever, and if ever, you get rattled by competitive, frenemy-type forces, you need a method to course-correct, to lock back in, and to remind yourself why you are investing so much life-force into this qualification.

And here is the less palatable truth nestled within that: you have to be willing to be disliked. The 1% are often resented, and you have to make peace with that. Pretending to be more average than you are, just to make other people comfortable, is one of the most common ways high-potential students sabotage themselves. They downplay their grades when asked. They stop putting their hand up in seminars because someone rolled their eyes once.

Do not change. The peers who would resent you for excelling are not the peers whose opinions should be shaping your trajectory. They see it as a zero-sum game, where your success means their failure. I heard people say I had my priorities wrong, but I knew what I wanted, and because it came at the cost of nobody else’s success, why would I have changed anything?

So stay in your lane, keep your head down, and accept that being exceptional will cost you the arguably nugatory kinship of idlers and naysayers.

3. Manifest scholarly maturity early

To reverse-engineer a goal like unlocking funded doctoral positions at Oxford and Cambridge, you need to stand out from the crowd.

Because I was already putting everything I had into my undergraduate essays and coursework, and had a proven technique for excelling on paper, I effectively had the best of my scholarly self at my disposal when I wanted to leverage myself outside of university.

Among the 16 first-class papers I produced as an undergraduate, several were touted by my professors as possible publications. So I applied to a conference in Italy with one abstract, and got on. I then applied to two more conferences, in Turkey and the UK, and got onto those as well. At every one of them, I was the only undergraduate. Everybody else was a final-year PhD candidate, a tenured faculty member, or a full professor. I was then invited to contribute to the conference proceedings, and published my first peer-reviewed paper while still an undergraduate.

This was basically unheard-of among undergraduates, and it went a very long way on my CV and personal statements when I applied for postgraduate courses at Oxford and Cambridge. It showed a level of commitment to scholarship that no amount of bossing the curriculum could reveal. I went on to do the same with my Master’s thesis, which I published in the year off I had between finishing at Oxford and starting at Cambridge.

4. Leverage the power of networking

I would never in a billion years have believed that networking would help me unlock places at Oxford and Cambridge. And as a highly introverted, socially anxious person, I never would have thought I could network the way I did. I look back and genuinely shock myself at the amount of hustle that went into it.

But it surely played a huge role. I didn’t just attend conferences, reading groups, and workshops nationally and internationally. I also never skipped an open day at my target colleges.

When I applied for Master’s degrees, I got into both Oxford and Cambridge, and I so impressed the faculty at Cambridge that a professor who had never even taught me volunteered, completely out of nowhere, to write me a reference for when I wanted to come back and do the PhD. I didn’t know that was even possible. But I was putting myself in the right places and doing so much hard work that the academic world was opening up like a beautiful, though rather unpredictable, flower around me.

Of course it was exhausting, going from city to city on long train and bus journeys. But professors being able to put a face to a name made an enormous difference when it eventually came to unlocking scholarships and myriad other opportunities. It genuinely shocked me how what you know and who you know can converge into very rare opportunities.

5. Treat your reading list as a floor, not a ceiling

The students who get good grades read what’s assigned. The students who get firsts read what’s assigned, and take it seriously. But the students in the 1%, the ones who unlock places at Oxford and Cambridge, read what’s assigned, then follow up on its footnotes, then track down the most relevant names in those footnotes and read them too. All of it accompanied by copious but exceptionally shrewd note-taking.

This is the single fastest way to start sounding like a scholar in your essays, rather than a clever student. Your professors will notice immediately. When you cite a scholar who wasn’t on the reading list, or bring in a debate from an adjacent field that illuminates the question in an unexpected way, you are signalling something grades alone cannot: that you are reading because you are genuinely looking for novel contributions to knowledge, that you are trying to triangulate on an idea for the sake of exceptional conceptual clarity, not because someone told you to.

That is the difference between a student who follows the curriculum and a scholar who might eventually push the field forward. And it is the precise quality postgraduate admissions tutors are searching for when they read your personal statement and writing sample.

6. Get a co-author

Another very nifty way to consolidate the extra-curricular part of your CV is to co-author. This is something I have done at many points in my academic career. Admittedly, the main reason was that my co-authors were more senior than me, and I could essentially earn a relatively cheap publication by writing with them rather than alone.

Several opportunities present themselves this way, particularly special issues of journals. When a scholarly outlet invites submissions on a particular topic, it is much easier to work with someone else to write to that brief than to get very, very lucky with a publication at a top journal in your own name. It isn’t impossible to do it solo, but early in your academic life your energies are better spent fleshing out your CV with more propitious wins than trying to lay one golden egg every half-decade.

Write for essay prizes that come with a “free” publication and a good deal of kudos. Write blog posts for your university philosophy society on fashionable topics that will interest your peers and show your professors your dedication to scholarly service.

7. Cultivate rational eros

There comes a time in every young person’s life when, let’s say, more mature feelings come to the fore. It is very important to know how to channel these in education-milestone-appropriate ways.

If you can, find a way of unlocking what Plato and I would call rational eros. On Plato’s view, understanding is intimately connected to desire, but you won’t necessarily desire understanding, the highest form of knowledge, without channelling your lower passions and feelings in a loftier direction.

For the philosopher, erotic longing directed toward the Forms creates a kind of imbalance within the soul: by devoting himself wholly to the pursuit of wisdom, he neglects what the soul’s lower elements demand. Yet there is a paradox here. Precisely by abandoning the project of governing his inner life in favour of contemplation, the philosopher unintentionally weakens those lower elements through sheer inattention, and so achieves self-mastery as a kind of side effect.

This erotic dimension is located entirely within the soul’s rational part. When Plato characterises the act of understanding as erotic, he is gesturing at something richer than pure intellect: knowing involves feeling, aesthetic responsiveness, and desire all at once. What draws the philosopher toward the Forms in the first place is their beauty, and once he glimpses them, the encounter awakens a longing both to know them more deeply and to shape himself in their likeness.

So be curious about who you are as a rational being, and see whether you can learn to burn for knowledge.

Final thoughts

Now, none of this was about being the smartest person in the room. It is about being the most intentional one, the one who sees a gap in the literature and pursues it like a bloodhound, pinning it down and giving it expression in the clearest possible terms. More broadly, it is about treating your education as the rare, precious opportunity it is, and refusing to squander it on anything less than the vision you hold for yourself.