Should I go to Oxford?

1.

I’m not naturally smart. I’ve never been anywhere near the top of my class at school and can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve ever achieved full marks. The threads that I’ve seen where people ask this same question tend to be something like “I never had to put any effort in in secondary school and still got perfect grades, how will I adjust to the Oxford workload?” I am the opposite of this. I regularly had to do 8 to 10 hour revision days well in advance of my exams to get good grades in things like maths. During Christmas break of S5 (year 12 in England) I did this every day for two weeks with the exception of going to church on Christmas morning to get myself from literally failing maths (getting less than 40% in homework) to a safe A standard of nearly at A1 (Scottish version of A*) level. How will I cope with Oxford standard work when I could barely do Higher maths? It might be worth noting that I felt like I did less work in S6 somehow, even though I did more? That could have been because I actually enjoyed the work. For S6 I only did Advanced Higher English, History and Modern Studies (the closest thing in Scotland to A-Level Politics) and dropped maths and biology. I stayed in school every day in S6 until about 6pm to get more work done and during prelim (I think England calls them mocks) time I went to my local library afterwards to do more. If I had to do this much to get A1s/A2s in subjects that are supposed to be my strength how will I survive in a place where most people got all A*s without ever revising more than a couple of hours a day?

2.

I had to apply twice to get accepted. I applied last year and didn’t get in. My feedback told me that in the HAT, written work and passage-based interview I had gotten the average score of accepted candidates or better but that I had severely flopped my more conversation-based history interview and my politics interview. This gave me hope that maybe if I tried again and made sure my HAT and essay were exceptional and did actual interview prep beyond reading some articles while travelling to Oxford I might stand a chance as my other scores could help compensate for the interview scores that I knew would be my weakness. This strategy worked but now I’m thinking; if I had to put this much effort and strategy into getting accepted, am I actually Oxford material? Surely if I was actually good enough I wouldn’t have needed to do this much.