My Experience of Reapplying

By Abbie Nott

This time last year, I had made peace with being rejected from Oxford and was getting excited for my other university offers. I had applied deferred, so knew it was a long shot from the get-go and didn’t really give it a second thought as I had other options.

Flash forward to around 7 months later: my original gap year plans to live abroad were (understandably) out the window due to the pandemic and I found out UCAS were letting people reapply to universities without losing the deferred offers held for the 2020 cycle. Up until this point, I’d not considered revisiting Oxford because I had a great deferred place I was happy with and didn’t fancy giving that up to potentially not get it again.

However, having nothing to lose made me go for it: I sat the ELAT exam (I applied for English both times) for a second time and it went smoothly, then I was pleased to be offered an interview! It was a slightly different experience to the 4-day epic excursion to Oxford of last year, but I really enjoyed the more relaxed style of online interviews. I finished them thinking they’d gone, in my own words, ‘a bit meh – nothing terrible but nothing outstanding’.

It must have gone ok though, as I got in! I’ve never been so surprised as when I saw the little ‘thumbs up’ icon on track. If you’re considering reapplying or wondering whether it’s worth going through the whole application process, I would say go for it. There are always other options if it doesn’t go to plan and, you never know, you might surprise yourself! I hope my odd way of getting to this point might inspire you to give it a go too.

(Also, please check out my current gap year project – I’ve just started a blog to talk about this kind of thing as well as other English-related content at http://www.abbiesarchive.wordpress.com/ )