Hi,
I had a pretty similar situation (kind of) last year. I applied for medicine and then got accepted by Imperial College (and when it comes to medicine, an offer from Hull-York medical school is a major achievement seeing as 60% of applicants get four rejections)
I’d been in love with imperial for years before this, since secondary school. It felt like my life was too good to be true. But I botched my exams and missed my offer by a mile.
To say I was dejected was the understatement of the century. I would cry every morning when I woke up and every night before I went to bed. I’d not only ruined my chances of going to imperial but my chances of going to medical school entirely, because they don’t take retakes. All of a sudden I couldn’t become a doctor (unless I did grad medicine but that was even more difficult). I had to deal with the rejection and go about finding a new career after aiming for a career I’d been working towards for years, all in the space of a few months. In summary it was a horrible experience.
More than feeling like a failure I felt like I’d ruined my life and let myself and everyone around me down. But I still felt like a failure. I know how it feels, like there was a perfect version of your life just waiting for you and you ruined it. But what you need to realise is that oxford alone was not the factor determining that life. It is a much smaller thing than you think it is, and even if you had gone, your life might not have been as good as you think.
Not all smart people go to oxbridge and not all people at oxbridge are smart. Oxbridge is not the sole measurer of your intellect or achievements. Just because you didn’t go doesn’t mean that people won’t marvel at how talented you are. You aren’t oxbridge, youre yourself and it is up to you to make sure throughout the last part of your academic career you shine to the point where you won’t need oxbridge to excuse yourself.
I had a chemistry teacher in my college (all the teachers apart from him went to oxbridge) who was the best teacher I had ever had in my life. He taught himself an entirely new subject up to graduate level independently to teach to us. I don’t think anyone is his classes had ever not understood something after he explained it. His career was teaching and he excelled at it. He was better than all the other oxbridge graduates and he went to imperial. It made me wonder, how could someone like him not have been at oxbridge? And then I realised that there are loads of people like him who are the best in their game but didn’t start off they wanted to. (Actually I found out that he didn’t even apply to oxbridge in the end, even though he could’ve) So trust me, you don’t need to be upset.
Sit down and write all the reasons you wanted to go to oxford. Did you want to prove the statistics wrong? Did you want to make your family proud? Did you like the uni, did you want to be in the ‘went to oxbridge’ crowd? Really think about your reasons and picture yourself there, picture whatever you used to imagine, entertain all the thoughts at the back of your mind when you applied. I think you need to sit down and accept the truth, that you didn’t go or won’t be going or whatever, so that you can move on. Now write all the bad things about oxford (sounds bitter but it does really help, and I know you must have some things you dislike because nothing is perfect ). After you’ve entertained all the bittersweet thoughts, from then on whenever you think about the first list counter it with the second. It’s something I used to do and it sounds hateful but it actually made me remember that there is no such thing as a perfect experience of something, or a perfect life, because the second list is as true as the first and will pop the bubble of this perfect life you have felt like you missed out on since 2014.
I’ll stop here cos I could go on and on but I just want to say that you should take this as your first lesson in real life. Obviously academically you’ve clearly never missed a goal before so it’s good that you experience it now and not later on (when you misread a case and accidentally put your client in jail or something lol), so accept it and realise that something as big as this is better to have happened now than later on in life. The people in oxford are not living or will live better lives than you, no matter how it may seem. I saw that with my teachers. I’m also black and I know how it feels to work so hard with less entitlements than others and not make your goal. You need to believe that you will still be great, and happy, because of yourself and the decisions you go on to make in your life, not because of three years of uni that may or may not have made a difference to your future.