"I think the general criticism in these comments is inevitable but not wholly fair. My experience of Cambridge, visiting St Catherine's and being interviewed by Jesus, was mostly positive. I wasn't hit by prejudice from stiff upper lip middle Englishmen but instead by academic prejudice. The interviewers were scary and intense people because of their rigorous thinking, something that is quite easily mistaken for snobbery. Two out of three of my interviewers were warm friendly Eastern Europeans and the last one was a softly spoken man, a million miles away from the usual image that people conjure up. I'm sure somewhere I read about them complaining about someone's dress code. Well I turned up in Jeans and a faded polo neck, and frankly they didn't care what I was wearing.
I'm happy to have received an offer from them to do Maths (explains my grammar) with Physics but either way I would have still respected the university. Coming from a state school I was aware of the slim chances of getting in so I was under no illusions. On the other hand I knew that people from public schools weren't innately cleverer than me. If innate ability is uniformly distributed across the population then the cleverest in a state school of 2000 is as innately clever as the cleverest in Eton. All that is left then is to work on that and achieve potential, something which is sadly neglected in most normal schools. I've seen peers clever enough to go to Oxbridge but thanks to lack of passion or coaching, they have failed. Had they been in a public school both of these would have been commonplace. It's a sad fact of life that the natural flow is for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. Social mobility isn't a simple or new problem by any means."
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