• Question: How hard is it to get into Oxford or Cambridge and get a degree?

    Asked by anon-189324 to Yousef, Rachel, Petrina, Michael, Jason, Emma on 12 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Mike Ambler

      Mike Ambler answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      Hi RHN, I think there are lots of really excellent universities in the country, and oxford and Cambridge are just two of them. generally people need to get good a-levels and to answer questions in an interview well.

      More and more though the universities are trying to find people with good potential, even if they maybe haven’t got the very best results in their a-levels, and this is important because sometimes people don’t necessarily get the results they are capable of when they are relatively young at school.

      If you are interested in going to a university like oxford or cambridge, you could contact one of the professors in a subject that you would like to study and ask if you could meet and have a chat about what it is like to study there and how to get in. This is what I did when I was deciding where to study and what to study.

Comments

  • johnmidgley commented on :

    I think Mike’s advice is very good.

    What I would add is based on my own experiences.

    The top level universities are interested in the potential of the student, not always what has been done but in what they could achieve.

    I failed my exams at school, ended up at what was the lowest ranked tertiary educational establishment in the UK by chance. I worked hard, studied in my own time, and years later, applied to Cambridge on a whim. I was accepted with a very short (10 minutes) telephone interview and am now 2/3 of the way through a Masters of Studies (MSt.) degree.

    If it is what you want, work hard, never give up.