Student Blog: Accessing Yorkshire

A year and a half of studying at Brasenose has been the most incredible time of my life. The people I have met, the places where I get to spend my time studying, and the experiences I have had during that time have all exceeded any expectations I had before I arrived. I am so glad that I chose to apply; doing so was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Therefore, a week of outreach work in North Yorkshire (one of Brasenose’s link regions) encouraging students to consider whether applying to Oxbridge might be a good option for them was an opportunity I jumped at.

Alongside Joe and Holly (who are in charge of the college’s outreach work) as well as students and staff from St Catharine’s College, Cambridge who share North Yorkshire as a link area, I got the chance to spend a week of the Easter vacation on a roadshow talking to students around the county. Across four days of visits we gave assemblies and workshops to hundreds of students across around 20 schools.

At each, we began with a talk explaining how Oxford and Cambridge differ from other universities, for example our collegiate structure and the focus on small group teaching in tutorials (or supervisions as they’re called at Cambridge). We shared our personal experiences of college life and what we thought of our tutorials. As you might have been able to tell from my introduction, my experience of college life has been amazing and I can’t imagine anywhere better for me. My experience of tutorials has been that they were initially daunting but after the first few I settled into them and have found them to be an excellent way of learning, allowing me to have one-on-one or two-on-one conversations with world-leading academics about each week’s work.

Though I have found both of these features of my university experience to be beneficial, their uniqueness can lead to confusion so it was good to be able to demystify them for the students at the talks.

Following this general talk, we split into smaller groups by subject to answer more specific questions that the students had. It was great to be able to engage with students who were interested in our subjects and to be able to explain to them what their life might look like if they came to Oxford or Cambridge to study.

Like many current students at Oxford and Cambridge who attended state schools, I benefitted massively in my decision to apply from the universities’ regional outreach work. As a year 12 student I found it incredibly helpful to see Oxbridge students from a similar background to my own and to be shown that many of the things which I was worried about were not true. As such, it was great to be able to pay that good work forward and break down some of the same myths which I was worried about when I was in Year 12.

One of the biggest things which I was concerned about when first considering applying was that Oxford was not for people like me. As a comprehensive school student in the North East I worried that I fell outside of the model of who could be an Oxford student. What I have found in my time at Oxford so far is that there is no single Oxford type. Brasenose is by far the most diverse community I have had the chance to be a part of and my friends here come from a wide variety of places and backgrounds. Rather than all fitting into one stereotypical box, my experience has been that the common thread linking Oxford students together is not a shared background or prior educational experience but rather a passion for their subject, a hard-working nature, and a desire to learn.

I should stress that this does not mean that we spend all of our time working though! Finding a good work-life balance is certainly possible. Whether it’s playing an inadvisable number of pool games in the JCR (our student common room), spending an hour chatting over a meal in the dining hall, or going on a college bar crawl with my French law classmates, I always manage to find some time in the day to socialize as well as getting all of my work done.

I am immensely grateful to those who helped to break down these myths for me when I was in sixth form. It really helped to give me the confidence to apply. I hope that the work we did on the roadshow will have a similar effect for the students that we talked to. Getting to take part in it was incredibly rewarding and is one of my highlights of my time as Access and Admissions rep so far.

By Lukas, formerly of Durham Johnston Comprehensive School