Oxbridge 2023 support; it's offer month. Good luck all.

[Riverpebble]

New thread for the start of the Oxbridge offers.

@rejects I feel for you! DC was pooled but rejected last year. Got some great offers elsewhere and enrolled at uni but decided to withdraw one week into the course and reapply. Now waiting to hear from Cambridge....

Dear me about that mother @FancyFanny - she sounds like she has done far more harm than good by obsessing so much.
Sad for the dd.

The days of "all the places going to private school kids" are very much over it seems.

I found this a wonderful post - so wise and helpful. Thank you very much for the expansive picture of another possible future...

I too have found all of the above posts so helpful and it felt so good to hear other parents stating some of the things that I am feeling. I really appreciate it.

I'm so glad I started these, you are all lovely to each other.
I'm mostly quiet but I read all the posts.
Thank you!

Taking an objective view, the declining Oxbridge offers for many of the highest achievers is on the flip side a very positive thing for the universities which these candidates do go on to study at. It will ensure that those accepting institutions are receiving the highest calibre candidates - making them great places to study at - which in turn will perpetuate the world class standards at those institutions, allow them to thrive and attract more research funding from the commercial world and widen the donor pools from alumni, thus making real strides to level the playing field and reducing the stranglehold Oxbridge seemingly has on our collective psyche.

This might also result in schools actively dissuading pupils from going down the Oxbridge route as the process probably is becoming only for the strongest hearted and most resilient and it would be a more positive thing for pupils to look in earnest at the other universities and put their energy into securing places at those alternative destinations. I think schools have a duty to drive home that message. that was certainly what we heard from DS’ son school in relation to medicine as the track record of admissions to Oxbridge over the last three years had fallen to 0.

My eldest turned down Oxford despite being encouraged to go by their school, they had a look round and did a residential there before deciding that it wasn't for them.

They got the grades needed (both for Oxford and their choice ) and went to their chosen university and had a good academic experience. Five years on, they've finished their masters and got the job they wanted so it's not held them back at all.

I always said to my next child that they could go wherever they felt they'd be happiest. Now they have an offer for Oxford but they are waiting for a reply from another university before deciding for sure where they want to go.

are you saying your eldest chose not to apply @Riverpebble or applied and accepted an offer but then declined it?

Im confused as to why that perspective is helpful for those who didn’t get an offer.

Of course lots of extremely able pupils choose not to apply. Because the course doesn’t appeal, the style of teaching, the city etc etc. But those who do apply care deeply in most cases so being flippant or dismissive about offers or applications seems a bit off tone. Particularly saying they have an offer but aren’t that fussed.

@Rabbitsandhabits - I think you have misinterpreted Riverpebbles post. Once someone receives an Oxbridge offer, it's not inconceivable that they might change their mind (that has happened several times on the Oxbridge threads on here over the years). Surely that is the whole point of having (hopefully) several offers to mull over?

No not inconceivable and I know someone who did that. But in the context of people here effectively grieving for their kids about a longed for opportunity it felt misplaced to say ah well my DC had/have offers but turned them down. Maybe not needed right now.

and if the eldest DC just chose not to apply then they didn’t turn down Oxford.

I think Riverpebble's intention was just to agree with dnac's post that Oxbridge is not the be-all-and-end-all and nor should it be.

Scottishsummer - Thankyou and very best wishes!

This is very well put. I think that everyone with half a brain knows that there is life after Oxbridge. It comes across as slightly patronising from those whose DC don't have this to come to terms with. Fact is it is a hugely gruelling process for which you either win or lose. It's very final and there is no middle path.

I know my DC would have massively struggled with mental health issues at Oxford I'm glad they're not going for this reason. Doesn't make their feeling of failure (no matter how displaced and certainly very transient) real. Nor my sadness on their behalf.

I have seen all sides of this.

I was rejected after interview, genuinely didn't feel upset personally, worried my parents were disappointed, but had a fantastic time at my university and didn't give Oxford any thought at all.

My husband was rejected after interview and has carried this as a rejection for his whole life, I suspect not helped by his family who still think that it is the peak of academic achievement.

And now I have a ds at Oxford, who applied from a state school with relatively little stress or pressure, but who is totally passionate about his subject.

My own view, for what it is worth, is that oxbridge are not necessarily looking for the brightest students. DS is bright, but not a genius, and others in his year achieved higher grades throughout school but didn't get offers.

What ds has is a total, overwhelming, passion for his subject, and has since he was tiny. He says that his university friends are the same - live and breath their, often very specific, subject areas.

So, say history for example - if you are obsessed with a specific period of roman history, have devoted years of free time reading around it, and then have an interview with a tutor who shares that passion....far more likely you will be offered a place, regardless of all the prep and gcse results. You need strong academics to keep up with the crazy pace, but being bright isn't everything.

So, it's a perfect place for some people, but I'm sure I would've hated it, and I'm sure most of ds's school friends will enjoy their universities better.

Thank you so much, I know this is very kindly and sincerely meant as are all posts on here but again not always helpful, my ds's precise shock is that he is a total geek about his subject, reads huge academic tomes on the beach for fun, goes on day trips to see sites associated with it and the school clearly thought he had merit because he won the subject prize three years running. Then he saw kids win places who are known to copy and paste their essays from the internet and freely admit they applied to O because they thought it was worth a try and this was the easiest of their three A levels/other A level subjects they were studying weren't on offer. They had no genuine passion at all. Again, maybe my ds wasn't worthy of a place - who knows - but he has seen very clearly that people who don't care about the subject at all can get in with a bit of luck. My own subject at C was full of people who didn't care either. So that myth has been well and truly smashed.

It's truly lottery
I too was rejected at interview and cried a river, then went to another uni and had a smashing time. I have not met a succesful Oxbridge grad in my 20 year career in the City nor my life. Perhaps that's why I never saw the rejection as a failure. It's signpost for a turn.

@Rejects how upsetting for him and frustrating. Does make you wonder what’s going on when you put it like that!

You haven’t met one successful Oxford graduate in the city in 20 years?!

not sure where you work but I have met loads. You can’t deny plenty of people who went to Oxford have become very successful that’s such an odd argument.

@coteliq I thought this thread was intended to be supportive to both those denied and accepted. I don't think saying that you've never met a successful Oxford grad in your life would qualify as supportive to anyone.
There is no need to disparage those that were successful, and have themselves worked extremely hard, in order to try to make others others feel better.

The same candidate could apply every year (hypothetically) and some years may be offered a place, and other years rejected before or after interview.
I believe the tutors know exactly what they are looking for in the candidates who reach interview stage-in the end, decisions will be made according to the overall view of each candidate-that's why even those who really do ace the interview can sometimes lose out.
In my experience, Oxford seek out students who will thrive in the tutorial, i.e. lightning fast ability to consider new or opposing points of view, fluency of verbal and written reasoning and the ability to strip away the extraneous.
To have applied is brave and wonderful, to miss out on a place is heart breaking but in the end, there is never a guarantee that the passionate, the brilliant and the lovers of their subject will always be offered a place.🤗

My point was you can do well without Oxbridge, apologies if it was worded badly.

This question of 'passion' and supracurricular achievement is quite subtle I think. In itself it's not necessarily what departments are looking for, although stellar achievement elsewhere is of course likely to be correlated with good performance in tests and interviews. The way to be sure is to read the department's admissions reports, if they publish them, or the admissions reports for subjects at college level for Oxbridge, or talk to the admissions teams and ask them.

Eg for maths, engineering and physics at Oxford, offers are made on the basis of a score that consists ONLY of contextualised GCSE results (not this year because of TAGs, but two years ago and probably again from 2024 entry), admissions test result, and an interview score. Interviews almost entirely consist of working through maths-based problems. My DC have had four interviews between them - about 160 minutes of interviews - and a grand total of one question that wasn't 'and how would you approach this maths problem'.

So for them - explicitly at least - nothing else comes into it. Not the personal statement, not any extra-curriculars, not competition results - nothing. I think other factors sometimes get considered if a candidate is prevented from sitting an exam. I mean, if a candidate turns up who is the worldwide winner of the BMO or something realistically they're almost certainly going to be offered a place - but then realistically they're going to absolutely ace the test and the interviews anyway.

Other departments at Oxford and at other hyper competitive universities may well do things totally differently - numeracy subjects obviously lend themselves to a very precise scoring system in a way that humanities subjects probably don't. But future candidates might save themselves some heartache by being really clear about what explicitly counts and what doesn't. I suspect Oxbridge are minded to think supracurricular opportunities are skewed towards more privileged families and so shouldn't carry loads of weight in themselves, but beyond mathsy subjects I really don't know for sure. (This isn't aimed at your family @Rejects at all, your DS may well have ticked every box his department required, I just thought it was worth making the point for any parents of Y12s who might be lurking.)

I would say again as I said upthread I don’t think they do know what they’re looking for exactly – The physics department report explicitly said so. Hence mistakes are made and that is very, very tough. A good friend of mine is an Oxford lecturer, though he is not involved in the admissions process, and he says every year there is a scattering of students chosen badly by his colleagues who simply cannot cope with the course and drop out quite early on – massive waste of everyone’s time and it’s infuriating that their places could’ve gone to someone else who would have thrived. It’s pretty brutal and imperfect - but so is life and I do believe resilience grows from these situations (cheesy but true)

Funny, isn't it, how quickly the super-supportive friendly atmosphere amongst the 'grown ups' starts to disintegrate once the kids have been divvied up into haves and have-nots....