I must admit that, as many others seem to have done, I wrote Elly Nowell off as a sensationally cocky and childish attention-seeker when I first read about the letter of rejection she took it upon herself to write to Oxford University.
The 19 year old, who is presently studying for her A-Levels at a state school in Hampshire, wrote to tutors at Magdalen College, after attending an interview there, to inform them that she would be withdrawing her application. She clarified, “I realise you may be disappointed by this decision but you were in competition with many fantastic universities and following your interview I am afraid you do not quite meet the standard of the universities I will be considering”, and then went on to offer various tips for “re-application”. If they wanted a student such as herself to accept a place at the university then they should cease to hold interviews in “grand formal settings” which allow public school applicants to flourish but “intimidate” state school applicants. Not only this, but they should also address the “obvious gap between minorities and white middle class students”.
Initially it seemed to me that, for all her pretensions, the smug self-importance was untenable on two accounts. Firstly, she was foolish and quite simply wrong to claim that Oxford didn’t meet the standard of the universities she was applying for; it is repeatedly ranked in the top ten of universities worldwide, and its reputation in the UK is rivalled only by Cambridge. Secondly, she wasn’t even offered a place. You can’t reject something until it is offered to you; it just doesn’t work like that.
However, I have a sneaking suspicion that, lurking beneath my scorn and indignation, I felt a hint of jealousy at Nowell. Not because of her self-supposed ‘power’ to reject Oxford – for I am in no way convinced that her letter constituted a ‘rejection’ – but because of her confidence to actually criticise the daunting system by which students are selected to study there. My experiences of applying to university were stressful to say the least. Conflicting opinions from parents, teachers, friends, family, neighbours, distant relatives, friends of friends and every Tom, Dick and Harry concerning which university I was best suited to and, perhaps more importantly, I would be likely to receive an offer from, left me feeling overwhelmed. There was a point when I considered applying to Oxbridge myself, even though the comprehensive state school I went to actively dissuaded me from doing so, mainly because of the pressure I felt under from my (entirely well meaning) parents.
At home with them I felt as though I was ‘not good enough’ if I didn’t apply. At school, I felt stupid for even suggesting the idea, embarrassed that my teachers and peers would believe that I thought of myself as ‘above’ everyone else, and acutely aware of the fact that successful applicants from our school were very few and far between. For me, it was all too much. Receiving offers and rejections from my five choices was difficult enough so I can only imagine how I would have felt if I’d gone through the gruelling application and interview process at Oxbridge.
This is the point at which I begin to see where Nowell is coming from. Although her rejection letter is immature and, ultimately, pointless, she may have felt there was no other way of expressing herself at a time which can be immensely stressful for a young person. Admittedly I know nothing about Nowell but, in light of my own personal experience, I cannot help but feel slightly a degree of empathy towards her. It may well have been a mixture of pride and attempted self-preservation that led to her premature rejection of an institution she, very possibly, felt was likely to reject her anyway. Besides, I have no doubt that the tutors who received Ms Nowell’s letter will have felt not even a hint of the upset, humiliation and self-doubt that those who they reject feel on finding out that, for all their efforts, their application has been unsuccessful. That is, if they even bothered to read it at all.