Applying for History at Cambridge

I’m an offer holder for History at Oxford - the main supercurriculars I talked about on my personal statement were my EPQ and my essay competition win. I also briefly mentioned an online course I did with Cambridge - https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/access/ks5-language-power-and-cultures-programme/

I think there’s a misconception that you need to have the most amazing supercurriculars ever to stand a chance at getting an Oxbridge interview. They are definitely important, but what’s more important is that you have an obvious thread throughout your personal statement which charts your interest in a specific area of history, what draws you to it, and how you’ve explored it. A shopping list of supercurriculars is literally useless if you don’t expand on them at all! For example, I read the personal statement of a Cambridge applicant for Philosophy in my year which had no flashy supercurriculars on it, only her area of interest in Philosophy and her thoughts on the lectures she’d watched to expand her knowledge of that area. She’s currently an offer holder.

If you're planning to start some reading already, it might be best to begin with broader history books and narrow down to your personal topic based on anything that strikes you as a particularly interesting aspect of a historical period. One of the main things Oxbridge want is enthusiasm, so if something really stands out to you I'd recommend focusing in on it, regardless of how niche it is. You don't have to know everything about every period of history, and they're not expecting you to. The area I picked was twentieth century revolution, but I started off by reading very broad histories of revolution and narrowing it down to the sociological theories behind revolution + the specific revolution which I'd written my essay for the competition on.

Lectures are probably just as useful as books, and you can find lot of them online for free on YouTube, Gresham College or OpenLearn. Online courses are also very useful for demonstrating that you're committed to independently researching your area of interest and usually won't take too long to finish.

If you are looking for more competitions, I used this website -

https://www.libraeducation.co.uk/history-essay-prizes#:~:text=A%20great%20opportunity%20to%20start,words%20including%20footnotes%20and%20appendices.

There’s also this essay prize:

https://www.libraeducation.co.uk/en/essay-prize

And I’d really recommend that you try this one! It looks fun, I was planning on doing it but ultimately didn’t because I already had an essay competition win and couldn’t be bothered

https://massolit.io/competition

I'm happy to clarify if any of this doesn't make sense. Good luck!