everyone went to cambridge
...or Oxford.
There is a plethora of self-congratulatory chat that crops up around the Oxbridge (especially recent-Oxbridge) graduate crowd. You hear it a lot. You hear it most of all if you, too, recently graduated from one (or both) of the UK's most august institutions of higher education. Especially if you let yourself get dragged along to the Boat Race.
Even one or two acquaintances removed there is the same reverence for that type of graduate brand. "Things are going OK for you," someone might say β be it an aunt or an uncle or a prodigal primary school friend β "you went to Cambridge." Yes, I did, perhaps, spend some time there, you say. But, then, why am I as clueless and rudderless as when I first started?
Going to Cambridge or Oxford is not really any great feat. Nor is it a particularly reliable yardstick for personal talent or probity. Enoch Powell went to Cambridge. Stanley Baldwin went to Cambridge. Christ, even Kwasi Kwarteng went to Cambridge, experiencing significant academic success. Nevertheless, he emerged into the outside world with wild and terrific (terrifying?) consequences. The truth is that, were you to be the type of person who places great stock in these types of things (going to either Oxford or Cambridge before you die), you needn't wait particularly long. If you are not one of the lucky few who manage to enter with the undergraduate cohort, there's no great cost to waiting a year and perhaps applying to the Other Place instead (I knew no shortage of people who did just that and ended up experiencing a lot of academic acclaim after a year out). And even then, if you can't snag it, chances are you could make it into at least one of the two for your Master's. Though, granted, you may find yourself needing to pay the rather exorbitant fee levied by the two Universities for their taught postgrad programmes. In general, these are worth avoiding, as you pay very much for very little: as a domestic student, you essentially fork over something north of ten thousand pounds for two terms of lectures and the vague promise that an academic will spend an hour or two at the tail end of the year reading an essay of yours (grandiosely referred to as a "dissertation") before handing you either a Pass, Merit, or Distinction, and promptly showing you the door with little-to-no compunction about pushing you there. Thanks for the money β good luck from here.
And say that you lack the money, or even the offer, to take up a Master's at Oxford or Cambridge: not too severe a sentence. Wait a couple of years, or pursue a degree (or two) elsewhere, and after enough cycles it's likely someone somewhere in some Department will get along with you enough over the course of a 30 minute interview to invite you to spend three to four years pursuing research (nominally) under their auspices. Sometimes the interview may be one of the longest conversations you end up having with them. Once you're in, it's just a matter of time before you wear the red-and-blue DPhil gown to graduation at the Sheldonian. Bravo.
The truth is that Oxford and Cambridge are famous because they are very good. There are exceptionally talented people there doing amazing research in every field, every day, every week, every year. If you go paper surfing through your field for five minutes or so, you will probably find that Oxbridge co-authors make up a disproportionate number of credits on the best papers. As they should, because they are both very, very good, and very, very motivated.
But the same can be said about a thousand places. Lots of people go to Cambridge and then do their best work elsewhere. Lots of people don't go to Oxford or Cambridge at all but find themselves chairing a Department there after two score years or so. You may find that the best Professor in your Department never attended an institution with arcane duck hunting rituals or ministerial alumni lists. And yet they seem to be at the top of the game. How ever could this be the case, if they did not at some point go to Oxbridge?
I went to Cambridge, and I went to Oxford. Those experiences were both some of the most formative and important of my life, whilst also being the most challenging and painful years I endured. Sometimes I bitterly regret going up to Cambridge (and Oxford) in the first place; perhaps it is better to live a little in your late teens and early twenties, and worry about going up there for a postgrad once you have seen a bit more of the world, and a bit more of life. There is no barrier to a first-class research career if you went somewhere else beforehand β especially if you managed to scrape a First, in addition to living a fulfilling and happy handful of years on the way there.
What am I trying to say here? Maybe (only maybe, Hayden?) there is some latent self-loathing thriving in me, feeding on the fact that I did not thrive for the majority of my time at either place. But lots of other people do. The largest misconception about the Collegiate systems at the two Great Universities is that they're stacked with tenth-generation Etonians with Downing Street ambitions β and those people certainly exist, but you will certainly find them almost everywhere else, too, and they are certainly not a majority at either Oxford or Cambridge. Most people there are normal, sociable, down-to-earth, and (above all) incredibly talented and admirable. Very many of them are incredibly kind, too. Oxbridge is not a place for the rich to incubate and thrive while they wait to take up a peerage βat least, it hasn't been for a very long time. It is a place made as much for a working-class young 'un, maybe the first in their family to go to a university, as it is for an independently schooled PPE fanatic. Most of the fun of Oxbridge comes from seeing how those two types of person learn to live with each other.
The truth is that, for the most part, everybody went to Cambridge. Or Oxford. At some point. We're not a huge country, and these Universities are not astronomically competitive. Some people go to Lidl β perhaps most of us, at some point or another. But some people never do. That's OK. And it would be utterly bizarre to rate people by how much time they spent there in the produce aisle. After a great meal, you don't spend much time fretting about the place they bought the rice.
Don't let prestige be a trap. Or an end goal. Go and live your life. It's better that way.