Tab Guide: How to get nominated for BNOC

It’s that time of year again.

No, not Christmas. This is better than the birth of The Lord Our Saviour, Jesus Christ. This is the occasion upon which you will finally gain the attention, validation and (totally insignificant outside of the Bubble) fame that you have always desired and deserved.

You know that YOU should be the one to grab that top spot of Cambridge’s #1 BNOC of 2017. However, there’s one small obstacle: you need to get nominated. And none of your so-called ‘pals’ seems to have caught on. It’s time to stop just dropping the occasional subtle hint and start taking matters into your own hands.

Act as if it’s all a joke

Suggest to a friend that you should nominate each other – ‘as a JOKE obviously!! I don’t give a damn about this stupid competition, hahaha??? Who cares who gets in the top ten anyway!? I bet they’re all terrible people.’ You are so laid back and just don’t care at all. Not one bit. Nope.

Then, repeat on every friend and close acquaintance you know. You’ll establish a good base of nominations right there, just ensure that none of them discuss it together and realise what you’ve done, or you’ll be the sure winner of the Big LAME On Campus award.

Pretend you’re a thesp

Thesps gain facial and name recognition, but, God, at what cost? Gruelling rehearsal schedules, incestuous relationships and continuous bollockings from your DoS.

However, the benefits of the thesp life can be still be accessed by those who are too lazy to do any of the work. You can change your profile picture to a snap of you looking very earnest and theatre-y, with a background of a brick wall and the watermark of the latest play at the ADC. Who cares if you’re not actually in the show? This is beside the point – it’s the social media currency that counts. Nobody will notice. Probably.

Looks legit, right?

Get on camera at the Union

Again, the emphasis is low effort. Don’t participate in a debate. This actually requires some actual skill and very thick skin.

You can easily get the same exposure by being consistently caught on camera in the chamber. Take your prompt from Richard Parkins, more widely known as That Old Guy With The Beard Who’s Always At The Union. They take those photographs of speakers in the emergency debates. So, all you have to do is position yourself tactically behind someone on the front bench who is shaking and gripping a sweaty piece of lined paper.

Extra creds to the woman  in the green jacket looking SUPER interested and sincere

Make sure to pout for the entirety of their speech, even if your cheek muscles start to twitch with the lactic acid build-up. This is a small price to pay for BNOC-dom. A price that is not so small is the £200 Union membership that you need to actually get into the chamber. But, still, I think it’s worth it.

Go out every single night of the week

Make yourself known to all circles of Cambridge clubbers. For this, you’ll need to vary it up, going to different clubs at different times in order to increase your visibility, rather than simply consolidating it with the same people who go to Sunday Life every week. Even go to Fez, if you can stomach it. However, people who go to Fez are probably too #edgy to read The Tab and therefore less important contributors to your rise to the dizzying heights as Cambridge’s Biggest BNOC.

The queue to get out of Fez

Make sure to go to the supercool and wannabe indie events too. Sell your soul and kidney for a ticket and, when you get there, you need to fit in. Bathe yourself in glitter before ArcSoc. For Turf, wear that slightly risky impulse-buy you made of a slightly-too-wavy-for-you-to-pull-off garm from the Cambridge Vintage Fair.

Feature on TabTV

What better way to showcase your dazzling wit and drunken charm? You want to avoid the utter catastrophe of a mind-blank and a consequently wasted appearance on the video as Vanilla Girl Number 3.

Pictured: The author, at the exact moment of realising that she had absolutely nothing witty to say

Try sending our presenter Lauren Morris a message beforehand and bribing her into telling you her questions in advance. This means that you can dedicate several hours in a state of sobriety to prepare the most hilarious, original and seemingly ‘off the cuff’ response that TabTV has ever witnessed.

If all this doesn’t work, just go do it yourself over and over again, for God’s sake. And get some friends who realise just how much of a BIG DEAL you are.