This week four years ago, I received my offer to study English Literature at the University of Cambridge, King’s College.
I had no idea what I was walking into, and I had a lot to get used to. There are lots of strange traditions at Cambridge, and I didn’t have parents who went to Oxbridge to tell me about them.
The Cambridge week starts on a Thursday, not a Monday, and no one really knows why.
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When you join the university, you have a ceremony called ‘matriculation’. Although this sounds a bit like a painful medical procedure, it just involves signing a book.
When you graduate, part of the ceremony involves pulling someone’s finger (not a joke). I was raised by a single mum and went to school in Everton, one of the most deprived areas in the city and a place where going to Oxford or Cambridge was not something normally aspired to or talked about.
After I received my GCSE results, the possibility of applying to study at Oxford or Cambridge became a reality. The application process was different to other universities. You can’t apply to both Oxford and Cambridge, and I picked Cambridge because I loved the college I visited.
The college system is unique to Cambridge and Oxford. In Harry Potter, there are houses like Gryffindor and Slytherin and in Cambridge there are colleges. Although Cambridge doesn’t have a sorting hat, so you get to pick your own.
I picked King’s because it has a reputation as being the most liberal and relaxed college. At King’s you don’t have to wear a gown, and the formals are much more fun and chilled out than others.
At other colleges formals are a fancy candlelit dinner, whereas King’s had themes: we had a roaring twenties theme where everyone dressed as flappers, a festival theme where people wore neon, and a Harry Potter night with real owls.
I joined all kinds of societies and took advantage of so many incredible opportunities and I am really grateful for the experiences I had. However, there were many times I felt the odd one out.
Cambridge Undergraduate Admissions Statistics from 2022 show that the South East and Greater London made up 47.7% of the applications to Cambridge whilst the rest of the UK made up 55.3%.
In that same year Just 7.7% of applications came from the North West.
In my first few weeks I didn’t meet a single person with a northern accent. A lot of the people in my halls had just finished their gap year or ski season.
Early in my first year, I went on a date where the guy paid for both our pizzas, then asked me to transfer him the £7.50 to his online banking. I thought to myself, fair enough, right? We were both students on a budget.
We both got out our phones and I saw the balance in his account. It was £50,000. I had about £50 in mine.
Going to Cambridge with many people who were more privileged than me just made me prouder to come from Liverpool and embrace my own identity. I accepted that I was different to a lot of people there, but I didn’t let that hold me back from making the most of the experience.
There were times when my background and accent even came in handy. In my second year I auditioned for a production of Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers at the ADC Theatre, and I got the role of Linda.
Everyone in the cast was struggling with the Scouse accent, so the director got me to try and teach the southern cast.
One thing that is unique to Cambridge is that there is a rule preventing students from having a job during term time to ensure they can focus on their studies, which can require two essays a week plus preparation for classes and lectures. I broke this rule as I had to have a job to support myself. It was one of the best things I ever did.
I worked as a tour guide on the River Cam, pushing tourists up and down on boats called punts- a bit like Gondoliers in Venice. Through this job, I met lots of local people from Cambridge who worked as tour guides from similar backgrounds to myself. The job was also pretty idyllic as the route takes tourists past the most incredible sights in Cambridge such as the Bridge of Sighs.
If I hadn’t needed the money, I would never have had such a fantastic opportunity to meet tourists from all over the world (and take boats out in my free time!). I learned to delve into the bits of Cambridge I loved – the student union, comedy, campaigning, and journalism. I met like minded, amazing friends through these things.
I am so glad that I applied to Oxbridge, and I was delighted to see students from my high school receive offers last week. Notre Dame Catholic College tweeted: “Offers from @UniofOxford were released yesterday and we're delighted to hear that 2 of our students received an offer. Congratulations!”
When I got my offer for Cambridge, I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think I was good enough. The professors obviously did though. Throughout my degree when I felt I didn’t fit in or wasn’t clever enough, I often thought back to their decision to offer me a place and remembered that I had as much of a right to be there as anyone else. I want more kids from Liverpool to feel that way.
Now I have graduated with a First-Class degree from one of the best universities in the world, ranking in the top 10% of my subject. It goes without saying that this would never have happened if I hadn’t applied in the first place.
Cllr Harry Doyle is the director of the Aspire programme in Liverpool. The Aspire programme is aimed at young people attending Liverpool schools and is designed to help them to maximise their potential and make successful applications to top universities. They have helped 120 students to get a place at Oxbridge, with 156 receiving offers to study there in 2023.
The programme hosts monthly workshops with students in Year 10 and Year 12, key years when students are thinking about what A-Levels they study and making applications to university.
Cllr Doyle explained that these workshops give high achieving students from across the city the opportunity to “collaborate with like minded students” and ask themselves, “why not be aspirational? Why not put yourself out there?”
“We have a lack of Scousers going to these institutions, so we have a lack of representation at the highest levels. As Scousers we can be a bit modest about our achievements and what we are proud of, especially around academia.”
The Aspire programme seeks to change that.
Cllr Doyle organises residential trips, taking 80 students to St Peter’s college in Oxford and 70 to Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge.
He said: “Students leave the programme ready for life and the world beyond education. Even if a student is unsuccessful, students go on to a fantastic university and have developed skills to use through life.”
He added that the programme is about students “discovering the art of the possible. Discovering things you might not have done before, and the things you can be.”
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