“If you don’t apply, you won’t get in”

Amin was one of 19 students from state schools and colleges in Sheffield and London who spent last Thursday at New Hall and Fitzwilliam College, attending a taster day for ethnic minority sixth-formers. His views were typical of those of the group, few of whom had visited Cambridge before.

“Apart from a school trip to France in Year 10, the furthest I’ve been from Sheffield is somewhere near Birmingham, so today is a whole new experience for me,” said Hasina Khan, 17, a student at Silverdale School, Sheffield, who hopes to study medicine.

Dr Oke Odudu, a Fellow in Law at Emmanuel College and one of the event’s key speakers, said that he had seldom left Lancashire before he travelled to Cambridge for his interview. “I’d been to the Lake District a few times, London once and Nigeria once. It was a big thing to be leaving Lancashire and the environment I knew,” he said.

Both Dr Odudu and fellow speaker Matthew Ryder, a Cambridge alumnus (Law, Emmanuel) who is now a barrister at Matrix Chambers, talked honestly about the challenges of fitting into a predominantly white and middle class environment.

“At the end of my first term some people on my staircase were going skiing while I was going home to work in a distribution warehouse in Blackburn. I thought they were mad: why go from a cold place to an even colder one for a holiday. I still haven’t been skiing,” said Dr Odudu, who went on to study and work at Keele, Oxford, Harvard and King’s College London, before returning to Cambridge.

Mr Ryder, who set up the Cambridge Black Students’ Caucus while an undergraduate, urged students to make the most of the opportunity to learn how to get along with a wide range of people and to put themselves to the test academically in order to become “intellectually fearless”.

He said: “As I get older, I realise more and more what Cambridge did for me. I found the first term hard but once I found a group of friends, I began to feel at home. The experience prepared me to manage different environments and how to handle the former public school boys you encounter in law.

“There is a worry that students from elite private schools arrive at Cambridge far ahead. But it is often the opposite. If you come from an ethnic minority or otherwise untypical background, apply to Cambridge and get a place, then you are likely to have overcome greater challenges. In fact you may well be better and academically tougher than your more privileged white counterparts.”

Both speakers emphasised that there was no need to be daunted by the grandeur or history of Cambridge, or to feel that other students were better or cleverer, by virtue of their more traditional backgrounds.

Dr Odudu urged the audience to look at their options in simple terms: "If you are well qualified and you don't apply, you definitely won't get in - but if you do apply, you might get in. And if you don't get offered a place, then you are likely to go somewhere else pretty good."

“It’s great to hear these speakers as I’d imagined Cambridge as a posh place for upper class people. And I agree with Matthew Ryder that it’s good to get to know people from a wide range of backgrounds,” said Geoffrey Wu, 17, a pupil at High Storrs School, Sheffield, who intends to study biology at university.

Errol Legister, Aimhigher BME Coordinator for Sheffield, said that events like last week’s were valuable in shattering misconceptions about top institutions. “It’s excellent that our students have been able to put their questions to a black professor who has been through the system. There’s a big world out there and they need to go out and make the most of their potential,” he said.

Around 16 per cent of Cambridge students are from ethnic minority backgrounds. Initiatives to encourage more applications from groups under-represented at the University are undertaken across the University by Cambridge Admissions Office (CAO), GEEMA (Group for Encouraging Ethnic Minority Applications to Cambridge), and by a number of Colleges.