My Story
Let me take you back to 2014. The year where the Ebola epidemic became a global health crisis, but also the year your boi opened up his A-level results sheet and saw that he was on his way to Cambridge. However, I wasn’t the happiest of bunnies. Click here for the video.
Rewind a few months further, I had no intention of applying to Oxbridge. My mind was set on Birmingham: big city, great course and the perfect distance from home. However, my aunt, having heard my GCSE and AS results, was adamant that I apply to Cambridge. My first reaction was “lol, good 1” for 2 reasons: 1.I thought I’d have no chance and 2.I assumed I wouldn’t fit in even if I got in by some miracle. But, she persisted and I eventually decided “well, I got nothing to lose applying”. One thing led to another, the miracle happened and I was now about to go to arguably one of the best Universities in the world to study arguably one of the most challenging courses. Good for me right?
Well, it wasn’t all rosy. I still felt like a fraud despite having got the offer and grades, and honestly, I wished I had just put Birmingham as my top. However, I did realise that this was a great opportunity and I’d regret it in the future if I had turned it down. So I brave-faced it and got ready for the move.
I arrived in Cambridge at the beginning of October, having enjoyed a classic Cambridge 3-4-month Summer, very eager. Afterall, I’d seen photos of all my school mates having the time of their life in their fresher’s and I was keen to get in on the action. I walked up to my room in H staircase with bags in both hands, dad carrying some boxes and mum shouting at us for doing it wrong. The door was already opened for us, and I walked in to be greeted by huge oak windows, a majestic fire place and an underwhelming single bed. Pretty much what I expected tbh. I finished moving in with the help of the rents and I hurried them off, so I could get to meeting everyone without the risk of being embarrassed.
Going into it, I presumed that everyone would be mad intellectuals and that I had to come across that way too in order to fit in. To my surprise, I was greeted by people from all walks of life, with huge varieties in personalities and interests. There were plenty of people who talked and thought like me. Soon I realised, this place is like any other.
However, whilst other universities were throwing fresher’s fortnights, Cambridge threw fresher’s four days. Soon the first anatomy lecture dawned upon us, weirdly on a Thursday, the beginning of a Cambridge week. Immediately, I felt out of my depth. Whilst everyone around me were typing away furiously, I had just written down “9/10/2017”. I got back to my room and looked down at the immensely thick handout and thought to myself “I’ve f*cked up”. I truly felt that I had chosen the wrong university and that I was going to have a miserable time here and I’m going to fail at everything. And worst of all, I thought that I was the only one who felt this way. But, boy was I wrong. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to in Cambridge has had this feeling at some point and the thing that helped me through it was the support of the people around me and the knowledge that I wasn’t alone.
Once I’d gotten over the initial panic. I thought that if I was going to survive here, I had to switch things up a gear and commit to the grind. So I did. I said no to going out and yes to pre-reading, making my own notes and generally sweating.
However, this was not the key to success. Sure, I was making my own notes, just as I did at A-levels, but whilst I was doing that, I wasn’t really retaining. I wasn’t really consolidating or actively recalling anything, just writing notes and moving onto the next. The errors in my ways really showed when the January mock results came in: I barely scrapped a pass. So how did I turn it around to get a first and rank top 10?
Click here for the video.
