Shermarama

I did tours of the various universities with my likewise good but not posh sixth form college, and I wasn't sure about Oxford but it seemed less poncey than Cambridge, and since it seemed I ought to apply to one or the other I picked Oxford, but then I wasn't really that bothered when I didn't get an offer, especially after the interview experience at St. Hilda's. (I don't think I'd even considered Imperial. All the London places seemed to merge in to one from up north, and not a particularly special one.) So I went to Durham, because that was notionally the best (or most Oxbridge-like) of the ones I got offers from, and there was someone else I'd been vaguely friends with from my sixth form college doing Physics there too (incidentally a girl; two out of the ten women on a course of 150 or so were both from an old mining college in Wigan) so we both had that minor head-start on friends, and then we found ourselves a bunch more 'normals' to be friends with. (Easier because our college had very helpfully put anyone Northern, state-school or otherwise non-posh in the small block across the river from everyone else.) But although the non-posh were there if you looked, and there were several reasons I left Durham after a year, at least one of them was that it was tedious being such a sidelined cultural minority there. Durham was full of public-school types who weren't bright enough to go to Oxbridge but really wanted to cling on to a boarding-school-esque environment, which just turned them even more hideously stereotypical, I think.

Anyway, I think I would have done better at my first time round at university if it wasn't for the tremendous reverence there is for Oxbridge and its wannabes. It's not always the best place for people but there's this thing that says they're the best so you have to try. Ho hum.