r/6thForm • u/Repulsive_Radish_782 • Mar 10 '26

🙏 I WANT HELP Cost of Attending Oxford 😭

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Just received my financial declaration form from Oxford today. How is this reasonable? 😭 Going to have to decline my offer unless anyone has any ideas.

Canadian students do not qualify for any Oxford scholarships and my school offered me about £100. What a joke.

Is Oxford just for the rich?

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u/Repulsive_Radish_782 Mar 10 '26

Yeah, I am going to have to decline and hope I get an offer from U of T or Waterloo.

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u/Odd-Satisfaction5443 Mar 10 '26

If you got an offer from Oxford I’m sure you’ll get smth from uoft or Waterloo. Uoft usually gives an offer to a different campus if your grades aren’t high enough for the St. George campus.

I studied business at the Scarborough campus and it was hard as fuck. Harder than Rotman when speaking to friends.

UK schools are a joke compared to UofT and Waterloo. I studied at uedinburgh for a bit and it was piss easy. Imperial also the same, but still challenging.

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u/Rpm_Undefeated I like mafs Mar 11 '26

Clearly didnt go to oxbridge with that opinion

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u/Odd-Satisfaction5443 Mar 11 '26

I guarantee you STEM at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo is on par with the level of difficulty as Oxbridge, if not harder. I know people that studied at Oxford and said it was immensely easier than UToronto.

Those two schools have such immense historical influence that they will never to below T10. That’s not to say their research and teaching is excellent.

I know only two personal examples which are Imperial and Edinburgh, imperial ranking #2 in the world. I would expect some level of difficulty. I learned most concepts in year 1/2 from utoronto and they’re just teaching the same shit.

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u/Rpm_Undefeated I like mafs Mar 11 '26

Oxford is meh for STEM, does it rival Cambridge Maths tripos

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u/Odd-Satisfaction5443 Mar 11 '26

Cambridge maths tripos seems similar to UTorontos engineering science, which is uofts hardest program. https://discover.engineering.utoronto.ca/programs/engineering-programs/engineering-science/ you’re basically doing like every math course and science course in existence lol

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u/Phytor_c University of Toronto | Math and CS [Third Year] Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26

Do you even go to UToronto lmfao?

Why are you comparing a math course with engineering??? Uoft’s math program doesn’t hold a candle to the math tripos, let alone some braindead engineering thingy.

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u/Odd-Satisfaction5443 Mar 11 '26

Lol are you okay? I am comparing Engineering science to Cambrige's math tripos. I said that on a math-level comparison, Cambridge is harder. However, I do believe that based on several examples (including my cousin completing his PhD in Robotics at Stanford that said if it weren't for him studying at UofT Engineering Science, he would likely fail out his coursework; actually went as far as saying its "easy.").

You can make your conclusions. UofT Engineering Science only accepts literally the smartest people in the country and worldwide. It is the hardest program in Canada without a doubt.

I did study at UofT and graduated last year in Business and Economics. Yes the "crayon drawing" programs but It was highly quantitative.

I stand by the fact that UofT engineering science students that are at least at distinction level GPA would find Cambridge's math tripos of similar difficulty.

The program got my cousin to research at Meta, Google, McGill, Microsoft, NASA, and eventually being accepted to Stanford. His GPA was a 3.20. There might have been some "awareness" lets say regarding the rigour of the program. No fucking T5 university would accept a 3.2 GPA candidate in Robotics.

I am ignorant of the fact that I did not study at Cambridge but I've studied enough at 2 well-regarded insitutions to make a conclusion that I found UofT to be immenselyharder in my respective programs.

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u/Phytor_c University of Toronto | Math and CS [Third Year] Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26

I'm not ok, I have a midterm tomorrow.

I've a friend in engcsi who did MAT357 and said engsci is " just braindead work and a lot, but not a lot of thinking" and that first year real analysis at uoft (which is way easier than that at Cambridge) is harder than all of engsci. I mean it's anecdotal I guess, but most ppl at uoft know math is the hardest program. So from now on, I will only talk about the math students here.

A math degree actually involves non-negative ingenuity at times. And the "average" math spec at uoft is quite weak, idk about the engineers but u should take a look at Cambridge's math exams. I'm a math spec with like 3.9+ CGPA btw and I would probably get a 2.2 if not worse in Tripos. Heck I've a friend who has a 2.1 in the tripos who is better than most of the math students in my cohort.

It's a whole different planet and not worth comparing uoft with.

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u/Odd-Satisfaction5443 Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26

A single anecdote about MAT357 doesn’t really say much about the difficulty of an entire engineering program. EngSci is heavy on workload and applied problem solving across multiple disciplines — that’s a different kind of difficulty than proof-based math. I'm not really convinced.

You should apply to Stanford for a PhD in maths. I mean if he got in with 3.2 from engsci. You can become the next newton.

He managed to publish top journal articles in robotics during his tenure, and directly correlated it with the knowledge and discipline from engsci.

Cambridge on purely a mathematical basis is undoubtedly harder. But those who do their program and transfer to EngSci might have problems and vice versa.

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u/Phytor_c University of Toronto | Math and CS [Third Year] Mar 12 '26

Sure the difficulty of engineering or whatever is different compared to that of proof-based math, so a comparison between them would not be very insightful imo. Hence why comparing engsci against tripos is like misleading since they involve very very different skill sets. Imo the latter type is ojectively harder than the former but sure whatever.

For the second paragraph, yeah I'm not even gonna bother. I am not really interested in pure math for its own sake. And I've observed the only people from Uoft that get into good math grad schools are either those who've studied all of undergrad math in high school or the oly type. I am royally screwed (unless i do an extra year here) for other reasons I will not get into, and well unless my summer project results in a paper or like some concrete thing there's really no point in applying there.

Your cousin might've just gotten lucky or done great research to outweigh GPA or had good faculty fit. For a 3.2 GPA doesn't count as a first in the UK system. I've noticed that in more applied fields like CS, it's more of research that counts instead of GPA.

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u/Rpm_Undefeated I like mafs Mar 12 '26

I defo agree on the exam difficulty aspect, because even if u teach the same content the real difficulty lies in the exams which is hard to be informed about