In my family, there was a sense that Oxbridge was unattainable,
but also a feeling of good for you for trying.
I'm a first generation student, so no one in my family
had ever been to university before, and I didn't really know what to expect.
But when I got here, I realised that there are loads of people in the same boat.
Hi, I'm Sarah, and I study the four year Classics course at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Before I came to Cambridge, I was at a state faith school
which would send a couple of people to Oxbridge most years.
Once I decided that I wanted to study at Cambridge,
I basically just went to the university website
and looked through all the information about the different colleges
and the different courses to see what might suit me.
I also went on Twitter and found the #CambTweet
initiative, where Cambridge students tweet about their daily lives,
and I could see what they were doing
and see if that was the sort of thing that I might enjoy doing as well.
I visited on an Open Day, which was a really incredible opportunity
to look around some colleges talk with some of the academics from the Classics faculty
and get a sense of what they might be looking for in a student
and what I might be looking for.
And of course,
I also got to talk to some of the directors of studies for my course.
Who are the people who oversee your academic life at Cambridge.
If you've grown up with Cambridge being this mythical place, getting in doesn't feel possible.
But once you're here, you'll realise it's the real world
I was really worried about
feeling imposter syndrome when I came to Cambridge and feeling like
I didn't deserve my place
and like I wasn't actually doing as well as people thought I was.
And that's still a thing that I experienced two years in,
I'll have a Director of Studies (DoS) meeting and she'll be like:
'Oh, it seemed to go really well this term.'
And I'll be like: 'Oh no, they think I'm doing better than I am. It's all going horribly.'
But you've just got to realise that you're here for a reason.
They wouldn't have offered you that place if you didn't deserve it.
And all the work that you do is a stepping
stone to work you're going to do later in your degree
and it's about improvement.
So even if you feel like you've handed in a really bad essay this week,
that's fine. You're going to learn from it and you're going to get better
Music has always been an artistic release for me.
It's somewhere that you aren't thinking about work in the slightest.
You're just thinking about how to produce the best noise.
And choir also gives you that community feel of being in any sort of music group gives you.
I'm really good friends with all my fellow choristers.
And we do things like biscuits in the crypt between services and choir
wine after the services, which is really lovely.
It can be really scary to take that first step into doing something
beyond your degree, but everyone needs some time to not think about work.
And so doing an extracurricular activity is a really great space to free your head
of all the things that are stressing you out and focus on something different.
And then it's also great for your CV.
You can put things like society leadership roles
and organising events on there and it's something to add,
something that adds to you as a person beyond just your academics.
Nice one team,
good first run.
Sopranos I thought you got away with that.
Living in a college is a great middle ground
between living at home with your parents or to whoever you live at home with
and living independently in the big scary world.
You're having to look after yourself, but you're also in an environment
with other people who are also leaving home for the first time potentially,
and with the catering facilities for if you're really scared
and you don't know how to cook
and the JCR to help run things in Freshers' week
and show you how to use the laundry facilities.
It's like a supported step into living independently
where you're not left out on your own.
A college is a space where you're going to be seeing the same people over and over again.
There'll probably be a couple of other people who are studying
the same course as you who you tend to have supervisions with.
But there's also the people that you're living with,
the people that you see in the buttery if you can choose to have food there
the people who sit in the cafe all day chatting with you.
It means that you have no choice but to get to know people and make friends with them.
Studying at Cambridge has been such a cool experience.
I never thought I'd get to learn about something
that I love in this much detail and to this higher level.
I'm really glad I applied and there's so much information out there,
so don't let anything hold you back.
One of the great things about Cambridge is the number of
bursaries on offer to help you with your finances.
Sometimes student finance isn't quite enough to cover
all your living costs, but Cambridge is a uni
where they really want you to be able to focus on your studies
without worrying about the financial impact of them.
I receive the Cambridge Bursary,
which is an extra £2,000 a year on top of my student finance.
I don't have to pay it back.
And it's a real relief to know that I've got that financial security.