Just to expand a little on this for the benefit of OP. I’d say 80%+ of students feel intimidated and (as the saying goes) try to look like a swan, all serene but paddling furiously under the water to keep up. But perhaps 10%-20% are actually talented enough to excel effortlessly in the academics and still do a bunch of other impressive things as well. My closest friend in college did original research in chemistry, redesigned the university newspaper, published a textbook on financial options, wrote for the Economist and did a second degree in philosophy just for fun.
That’s probably true of a lot of US universities as well, but what’s slightly different at (some?) Cambridge colleges is that they exalt intellectual achievement over everything else (including success in business and non-academic careers). And so those effortlessly successful students get rather more attention and adulation than they might at a place that would simply pigeonhole them as nerds.
I’ve found reunions, college newsletters etc focus a lot on academic achievements like Nobel prizes (even to the extent of humor about it - the last dinner I went to there was a joke about how someone only had one Nobel prize when they should really have got two if they had been talented, and the classic line “more Nobel prizes than France” is wheeled out repeatedly). One speech I remember (from a Nobel prize winner, natch) quoted Bertrand Russell’s autobiography (approximately as follows): “I’d been told that I’d find the most intelligent students in the world at Cambridge so my friends and I spent our first year searching for them unsuccessfully. In my second year we realized we were them.”
Personally I was OK with that (I’d been told how talented I was from an early age and didn’t suffer from a lot of self-doubt, though I certainly had to work hard), but I’m sure it’s hard for some others to take, especially when they knew they were outclassed by others (my sister-in-law complains about it decades later and never goes back for reunions).
Thank you so much!