The decision to apply to Oxford

Date: around ?/09/2002

After being given the application form I still hadn't made up my mind

The decision to apply to Oxford was quite a difficult one to make. Originally I would say to people that there was no way I was going to Oxford because I just wasn't good enough, in my opinion, to get in. Though a few people told me I was good enough to get in so I decided to go along to a meeting at my school about applying to Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge).

At the meeting I got a bit of a nasty shock. I had assumed that that we were going to be told about these universities and whether we should consider applying or not, but instead the meeting seemed to be for people who had already decided to apply and wanted to know how to go about doing it. We were first asked to write down whether we were applying to Oxford or Cambridge and what subject we were going to be doing, so I put down Oxford and economics.

This is possibly the point where I decided to apply for Oxford rather than Cambridge. I had never really thought about which of the two universities I would rather go to before and maybe just picked Oxford because I was put on the spot to pick one or the other. However Oxford does have some appeal in the fact that I've grown up here and I thought I had some idea of what I was getting myself into.

Anyway we weren't actually told a lot in the meeting, just that we needed to be expected to get good grades to get in and that we only had a very short time to decide. The dead line for forms to Oxbridge was less than a month away and the teachers needed a week or so to do the reference on our UCAS forms so this gave me a couple of weeks to choose if I was going or not and get the forms filled in.

See the Oxford application form

After the meeting had ended I still wasn't totally sure whether I wanted to apply to Oxford or not. But actually applying didn't seem like that much extra work, I just needed to fill in a second form of details and send of £10 to cover admin costs.

In the end I decided to make the final decision a bit later as I still had a couple of weeks to think about it.