So here's another person entering the small cohort of Arch and Anth applicants.
I'm currently studying Film Studies, English Language and History at college, with predicted A*AA. I only really decided on Archaeology and Anthropology in June (was planning on doing History before then), but once I did it was like an epiphany: everything made sense, and afterwards I just couldn't believe it hadn't come to me sooner.
I had always considered myself someone big into History for sure, yet what constitutes 'history' for most people, I just couldn't get into: dates, individuals, specific wars and events, when books started getting into those they just became less agreeable. But the houses people lived in? The clothes they wore, the decorations and material culture they surrounded themselves with? Once any book I read mentioned that kind of thing, I couldn't get enough.
Basically, I would never have considered it beforehand, but once I thought about what interested me most about history, and what the topics of all the books I'd recently been buying were (I'd actually had a few arriving that very day: Eric Cline's "1177 B.C" and a couple of Steven Mithen's works on the history of language and the mind), it just seemed blindingly obvious.
Oxford still remains an ambition that's "up there" (I'll be happy to get into Exeter, very happy to get into Durham – the place where all Oxbridge rejects go) and my expectations of getting in are low, but hopefully I'll manage it all the same, and wish the rest of you the best of luck too.