Is Bristol right for me?

Don't you think this is a bit too harshly put? I don't think the Oxbridge bias is really that severe. My sister studies History at Warwick, so not exactly Oxbridge and has five TCs offers including Slaughter and May, Freshfields, Weil Gotshal and Clifford Chance. She's my sister, so I think I'm well placed to say that she's not particularly exceptional.

I agree with most of what you said, just seems slightly strange that you bagged five offers yet say you need to essentially go to Oxbridge to stand much chance. How has the rest of your cohort fared?

Don't you think this is a bit too harshly put? I don't think the Oxbridge bias is really that severe. My sister studies History at Warwick, so not exactly Oxbridge and has five TCs offers including Slaughter and May, Freshfields, Weil Gotshal and Clifford Chance. She's my sister, so I think I'm well placed to say that she's not particularly exceptional.

I agree with most of what you said, just seems slightly strange that you bagged five offers yet say you need to essentially go to Oxbridge to stand much chance. How has the rest of your cohort fared?

I applied to all 5 MC firms and was rejected by all bar one that I went on the workshop to. I performed very well at interview there and their feedback confirmed this as they couldn't precisely point to anything I did wrong, call it bitter but I think that is no coincidence, it is also no small coincidence that over 50% of their trainees were oxbridge.

My advice to anyone would be to try and get into Oxbridge, it wont make you stand out as such; anyone can do this. It just makes life easier, I know people at Oxbridge and so am well aware of how easy it is to cruise into an interview at a top IB, law firm and so on. My cohort have fared very poorly, the people who are motivated enough and do a lot of applications like myself do pretty well for themselves, however this is only maybe about 10-15% of the year. As for the rest on similar grades (excluding those who got 2.2s) so mid to low 2.1s who only did a few applications, they got nowhere. Essentially if youre from Oxford on a 2.1 you will get an interview to most places you apply to, if youre from Durham/Bristol/London and so on you need more than this; you need to stand out and you also need to apply to firms that aren't obsessed with picking Oxbridge dorks.

Woooo go your sister! And I completely agree, from what I've seen the world of corporate law does seem to be broadening the pool of applicants from which they select from
I think if you're a hardworking and talented individual, somewhere along the line that will be seen and appreciated no matter which uni you go to

I'm just hoping the world of international relations lets people with UCL degrees in!:/

Sometimes I wonder why I'm doing Law, when (no disrespect to History) I could do a less rigorous course, and still have just as good prospects. I think she interviewed well, had good extra curricular, which are all just as important as your university within reason.

What exactly do you mean by international relations? I'd love to work for the UN, but I dunno, that seems like something you do when you're established. UCL is better than you give it credit for

Ah same, I keep thinking to myself "you could have applied for languages and actually enjoyedyour degree". I'm still contemplating applying for Spanish and Arabic, because it just looks like so much fun!

Well I suppose working in the UN's Office of Legal Affairs would be pretty cool, or as a diplomat or something. Or even being employed for an organization like Reprieve or Amnesty would be pretty sick Not necessarily, it is very much a 'who you know over what you know' sector, and there are people who are practicing barristers now who started out working for the UN. On St. Johns' website one of their listed Law alumni is a barrister who works for Blackstone now, but had done her BCL at Ox and her LL.M at Harvard and had done internships for the UN and NATO, which must have been amazing

If I was good enough to go onto postgrad study I'd want to specialize in the Law of Armed Conflict/Public International Law, but I've not given it too much thought beyond that How about you?

Fair enough. It still doesn't make sense, unless you think all of the intake at the MC firms were Oxbridge in this cycle. If they recruited some for London/Durham, surely your rejection wasn't down to being from Bristol. Don't you think that it could just be down to just too many top applicants. It's pretty hard to distinguish yourself, so rejections shouldn't be taken too heart. I don't think you can lump all the Magic Circle firms together, i.e Slaughter and May probably has a far smaller cachet, in comparison to Clifford Chance who have a far more diverse recruitment policy. Isn't the figure for Oxbridge below 50% and those odds are still fairly decent..

Yes, I think it is pretty obvious to most, that Oxbridge is still a pretty big player in the legal market but this doesn't mean that your chances are as slim as some people think.