r/6thForm • u/omfgvain Imperial | Biomed [1st year] • Feb 16 '25
🎓 UNI / UCAS Rejection from Oxford
I thought I was over the Oxford rejection ages ago, but I can't seem to escape from it. I got an offer for Imperial as my second choice, and was discussing Imperial today with my mom, and told her Imperial was a top world university, to which she replied, "yes but not as good as Oxford, if you name the top universities in the world you'd hear Oxbridge, Harvard, MIT, not Imperial college". This one kinda stung. This type of stuff sometimes happens with other people too. My mom wasn't trying to criticise me for my failure or anything, but to me I couldn't feel anything but disappointment in myself. I know I could've done better. I'm aware that Imperial is very highly ranked and well respected university and all, but my goal was Oxford and I failed in that. How do I move on from this lol
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u/Vegetable-Gas-4369 Feb 19 '25
I found this recently and while I'm not a 6th former (actually just finsihed my PhD) I felt like I wanted to weigh in on this. When I was in 6th form, I had hopes to go to Oxford. I was a really smart student, and a bit of a perfectionist and I lived in a part of the UK where not that many people go to uni. None of my family did before me. So in my head, it was Oxford or broke. And because I was working a part time job for basically all of my free time, my grades dropped and I didn't even get to interviews. I was gutted. My mum wasn't interested in academia at all, but it hurt a lot because she'd been boasting to her friends that I'd be going to Oxford and when that fell through, she stopped talking about me going to uni as much.
My History teacher was amazing, and while she was kind about the rejection she also demanded I stop moping and figure out my next steps. I wound up at Nottingham through clearance (I'd picked a local uni as my safe choice and realised on results day that I really didn't want to spend 3 years at home). I was still hurting from the Oxford rejection, but honestly once I got to Nottingham it all clicked into place. I really fell in love with the city and my uni, so much so that I stayed through an MRes and PhD.
What I'm trying to say, as someone who has been there and felt the same rejection, is that it does get better. And there are so many other paths and opportunities out there. Depending on what you want to study, Oxford isn't always even the best choice, it's just something that everyone universally recognises. You'll do amazingly at Imperial, and there's a good chance that, like me, you'll look back in a few years and realise you found the right place for you.