Oxbridge again

[ucasfracas]

I know there are threads on this but difficult to trawl through them to get the information I would like.

Anyone who has or knows of DCs who got offers,

What grades GCSE did they have?

What was the offer?

What was the subject?

Did they have to sit a 'special' exam as well and how much did this affect the outcome.

Answers to any/some of these would be gratefully received.

I should also add that we were not encumbered by monetary debt- merely by a sense of gratitude to the state for giving us a free education, which led to an acceptance of working very very very long hours for minimal wages once qualified! Not good.

Hello floco yes I remember, it was PPE. It sounds a much better idea to re-apply. If he was unsure about Durham it would be the worst possible start.

What has he done about colleges? I think you wondered if the same or different would be best. DD2 has a few friends even in her close circle who re-applied and got in.

Betelguese yes the article is old and her experience way older, I can't imagine why she wrote it after all those years - how corrosive, nursing that grievance. It's currently doing the rounds again on Facebook I gather, it re-surfaces from time to time and never fails to annoy. It's good that the students are defensive.

Goodness, has no-one ever read a Tanya Gold article before? This article is just her natural writing style: she's acerbic about everything. And deliberately provocative. Not worth investing emotional energy in!

Not too much emotional energy going on here I don't think. I'd never read her before, knew the young ones found her absurd, chucked it in.

How does she get published/ the job? It's dire!

the article didn't cheer me up, either. Although it is obviously just the view of one person I am concerned that if my child is accepted at Oxford they won't like it but will not admit to that and leave. Articles like that reinforce the steroetypes. The reaction by students and their parents also quite often confirms the stereotypes, one has to hope there are others who simply ignore it. On a more cheerful note at least mine hasn't applied to Merton.

funnyperson, you may have had a better experience than I! Some of the clinical teaching was really excellent on the wards, and I always found medicine interesting, but alas where I went it was considered really ODD to ask questions at the end of lectures or at the so-called tutorials, which were in fact just lectures to a smaller group. I'm sure the lecturers/tutors didn't mind, but those of us who started off in this vein soon picked up the vibes from the masses...

Hi
Thank you for remembering me! Yes, DS is going to try Oxford again and yes, Yellowstone it will be PPE again, although a different college. I have been steering clear of these threads for obvious reasons, however, I was thrilled to hear how well everyone has done since I last viewed. Such a relief to limit one's concerns to style of ballgown! That sounds rude but it is not supposed to be - there seems to have been so much angst in the past for everyone over uni choices, offers, results etc....
Interested to read that one of Yellowstone's DD has been to China this year, my DS has possibility of going to spend some time in a Chinese Orphanage which is supported by a friend of a friend.

good luck to your son, floco.

Dear all from this time last year-- many many thanks indeed for your support along the way which kept me sane.
Hope the DC have a fantastic time- as mentioned on last years thread...we will be in the Turf tavern from 5 ish!!!!! Join us if you are able. I wear glasses.

I wish funnyperson, we are nowhere near leaving!

Best wishes to your DD.

First best of luck to funnyperson's DD and Yellowstone's DDs and anyone else starting or going back this week.

Secondly thanks for all your help.

Thirdly DD has come up with her list of 5 all of which I would be happy for her to go to, she has also written her personal statement and I think it is great (just hope I'm right).

Fingers crossed for lots of offers then ucasfracas!

Hope everyone has given DC's a great send off for the next stage of life!

Thank you for all the good wishes. We dropped DD off with not a cloud in the sky to a very beautiful college with 6 happy looking students in yellow T shirts saying 'free Nelson Mandela' helping to unload and carry boxes up a staircase to a clean, well appointed room. This was therefor not only painless but enjoyable. We were then invited into a sensational long hall with wooden carved beams and given tea and cakes and sandwiches and sat on wooden benches at wooden tables to chat to the family and other families and listen to the warden say a sentence or two. We went to the Turf tavern and also sat in the sun outside the KIngs Head and walked up Broad Street and had a lovely lovely day.
However- on a serious note- and I don't know quite how to put this- I did not feel blended in. In fact I felt only slightly less unblended compared with when I went to university 30 years ago and was one of three brown medical students in the whole medical school (all 5 year groups).

There were 4 brown families of 150 Wadham freshers. There was one other brown person in the Turf. There were no brown people at the Kings Head.

There was a shortage of Brown people.

DD is not brown, I should add, because of a quirk of nature.

So, rather a surprise, as when I have taught the Oxford medical students they were at least 30% brown.

Not feeling blended is not a problem for me, but I was surprised that the 'inclusiveness' so much advertised and the Nelson Mandela T shirts (only 1 black fresher at Wadham) don't appear to reflect the actuality.
I cast back to when my DS was interviewed, with his superb grades and outstanding HAT performance and remembered then that he said he hadn't been asked a variety of questions and they weren't very interested in him and remembered then that I wondered whether the lack of interest in him at interview was because he was brown.

OK now you can all protest wildly. I feel ungrateful even pointing this out.

So, to try and be a bit more objective I looked this up
www.ox.ac.uk/about_the_university/facts_and_figures/undergraduate_admissions_statistics/ethnic_origin.html

and though the stats fit in with my perception to a certain extent, I realise I was also biased because my eldest, my son had not got a place (ie the more intelligent but quiet one!) and my younger one, my daughter had. Which is a very odd feeling, hard to explain.

Well there seems to be a much much greater amount of white candidates applying which affects the overall results. There seems to be no positive discrimination either, but how would you feel about that? Also did your DS apply for medicine (or do you have more than one DS?) in which case it is even harder to get into isn't it?

DS applied for a humanities subject. When he got his feedback he was told that he was 'Oxford Material' but not quite as good at Interview as those offered a place. I don't really know why I wrote that post. The Wadham freshers group on facebook shows that students come from all over the country- perhaps that explains why the ethnic mix is so very different from the London Universities, sixty miles away, where a significant proportion of students are ethnically diverse Londoners.
Anyway DD has settled in and is having a lovely time.

funnyperson - I have taught at both Oxford, Cambridge and now in London. Yes, Oxford is very, very white, quite startlingly so, especially in the humanities. Cambridge too, though perhaps fractionally less so. I honestly doubt it is (at least in most cases) a bias at interview problem - ime of interviewing I was if anything more positively inclined towards an ethnic minority candidate because we got so few of them and were v. conscious of that. London is a different world - very refreshing, much more representative, and in that respect I much prefer teaching in London. But that's not to say it wasn't a factor in your son's particular case of course.

My feeling is that the problem is self-perpetuating - when numbers are very low, if a black student, say, goes to look round Oxford they are quite likely to go away thinking (not unreasonably) that they would feel constantly conscious of their ethnicity. If they then visit a London college I can absolutely understand them applying for the latter. I think a handful of candidates are bold and brave enough not to be bothered by it, or even to enjoy being conspicuous, but I can readily understand why many don't. I've done loads of outreach events and I am honest about this factor with students if they ask.

kalidasa thank you for posting as it made me feel less isolated.

Oxford is such a fantastic place, so much of what happens there is a product, not only of the teaching and tutorial system, but also of the informal discussion and debate and sharing of ideas which happens over dinner, in the pub, sharing the extra curricular activities, in a way which just cannot happen in London because London is more spread out.

In the Turf tavern, DS met and chatted with 3-4 (not brown) other school contemporaries, just in the space of 20 mins waiting at the bar- it is the informal sharing of ideas and creation of networks between the intelligentsia which has the potential to lead to innovation- for example the creation of the Royal Society in the last century.

Thus it is a shame if Oxford (and by the sound of it, Cambridge though I have no direct experience of that) -for whatever reason- appears to exclude a significant intelligent group- and I wonder if this is what has contributed to the rise of UCL, Imperial and LSE in the world rankings.

I was startled by the lack of ethnic mix in the great hall at Wadham (whilst also amazed and delighted at the architecture) partly because at both the DC school there is no apparent shortage of Oxbridge acceptances of brown people doing what we laughingly call the 'brown subjects': i e medicine. maths, economics and management. Hence I was not expecting the mix I saw. Perhaps the acceptances are different for different colleges.

It would be interesting to know the statistics of acceptance by subject for each college broken down by ethnic group as well as school background.

As you say, it is not clear whether it is the candidates who, feeling uncomfortable, decide not to apply to Oxford, or Oxford tutors, who. feeling uncomfortable, are less non verbally approachable, and decide that the candidates are 'not Oxford material'.

I'm not referring to international students here- I am talking about those candidates born and brought up in this country. It is possible that non of this may matter- horses for courses as they say.