"I had thought about Oxford before but I was definitely not informed and it felt a bit like a pipedream. Pembroke North made it seem like a viable option... the access scheme helped to diffuse any sense of inferiority which is often felt by state school students at Oxford.

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My friends always highlight how much I go on about Pembroke North, and how many aspects of my life would be different without it. I am so grateful for the opportunities it gave me and I hope many more students in the future are offered those same opportunities."

“I was pushed to read and examine much more testing material than anything I had touched before.

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I don’t think I would have applied to Oxford without the programme.

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Meeting and studying alongside other state school kids made me feel a lot more comfortable about applying to an institution that I wasn’t sure was for me.”

"The skills I learnt from OxNet were very helpful in preparing me for university studies.

 

Doing a summer school programme at Pembroke meant that I was familiar with Oxford, and the tutors before I began my undergraduate degree. In addition, because the summer school in the programme was designed to give students on the programme a taste of undergraduate life, the intellectually rigorous nature of an Oxford degree which entailed weekly readings and tutorials was also not entirely foreign to me.

 

In addition, doing the programme also helped me with my school studies as it nurtured my interest in History and meant that I remained interested and enthusiastic about my History course throughout the duration of my A Level programme."

“I cannot stress enough that without the programme, I would not have applied to Oxford.

 

It helped prepare me for the workload I would encounter at university and how much I would be expected to write in a single week, as well as how to effectively use libraries.

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The Access programme was a formative experience without which I would not be at this university.”

"During my time on the Access programme I covered John Donne’s metaphysical poetry in the Pembroke Summer School, receiving the reading list for the first time was perhaps most memorable, but writing up the John Donne essay for my tutorial and then doing the tutorial was what I found most engaging. I honestly loved it.

 

Being able to have an academic conversation with an expert in the field felt so enlightening, a privilege that I had never experienced before. Winning the award for the best essay in my group was a highlight (we won a £50 Blackwell’s voucher which was my absolute dream – it gave me cultural capital that was never before available). Meeting other students, young women of colour, like me, from across the UK was incredibly empowering; it left me feeling like I belong at somewhere like Oxford. It’s the very reason why I applied!"

“My world has become so much bigger since coming to Oxford and I have met so many interesting people with exciting thoughts and ideas and I genuinely don’t think I would be here if I didn’t have the experience of being on the Pembroke North programme in lower sixth. The year-long investment that Pembroke puts into each cohort is invaluable.

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Whenever I walk past Pembroke I think… that’s where it all started.”