I knew exactly how she felt

[shermarama]

(Because of course having broken the oh-I-haven't-posted-anything-for-ages barrier I can now stick something short up without having to think about all the other things I was going to put up)

“I’m so glad to meet an engineer,” she enthused, “all the other women I talked to here were in marketing or law or something. I thought it was meant to be

Comments

[katstevens]

When I was in sixth form and thinking of applying to Imperial to do CompSci, I stayed overnight in their halls on a 2-day WISE course thing. It was enjoyable enough (if a bit threadbare) and made me feel better about studying CompSci in general, but as pretty much everyone else on the course was incredibly posh and wanted to do medicine, it 100% firmed up my opinion that I did not want to go to Imperial.

[shermarama]

If 'incredibly posh' put you off Imperial, why not Oxford? Perhaps I got it wrong by going for an interview at St. Hilda's, but nowhere else has anyone ever told me to 'oh, go on, say something. Your accent is so quaint!'

[x_mass]

ack its sad you didn't try Oxbridge and afaik other colleges such as wadem are much better

[shermarama]

I did try Oxbridge, as in I had interviews at a couple of colleges, but didn't get any offers. And then I went to Durham, and transferred to Sussex after a year because I was fed up of being one of the Novelty Non-Posh.

[katstevens]

Hah, this is something of a sore point! I was dead set against Oxbridge for ages! But my (good, but not posh) school organised a trip up to Ox on a sunny summer day, hardly any students about, our teacher being v careful to cherry-pick our college visits to get a broader picture of things. My best friend (who now has a Phd in Biochemistry) was sold immediately. Another of my best friends (in the year above) had already accepted a place. There'd be at least two 'normal' people there... so I applied.

But I still wanted to go to Bath! My Mum, my teachers and even my interviewer for the Bath CompSci course said I'd be better off at Oxford if they offered me a place. I eventually caved in, went to Oxford, made three sets of friends almost entirely from state schools... and nearly failed my first year, upon which Mum said 'maybe you should have gone to Bath' and I was VERY ANGRY with her. I prob would have dropped out then (my boyfriend at the time did!) if I hadn't been enjoying the social side of things so much. I hated most of the (highly

[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-