Last Friday, I tweeted to my few hundred Twitter followers that I, a Black woman, had received a first class degree from Cambridge. You can imagine my surprise that this tweet now has almost 100,000 likes. While some people were incensed that I had somehow played the elusive “race card”, I did receive an influx of support. Most importantly, I received a plethora of messages from Black girls asking for advice and thanking me for inspiring them to apply. Last year there was a rise of 50 per cent in the number of Black students admitted to Cambridge on the previous year, but many still feel that is not enough.
It matters that no one feels excluded from top universities, especially as a study out today shows that Black households are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as their white counterparts.
My own decision to apply to Cambridge was last minute. I did not expect to get an interview and, truthfully, I wasn’t sure if I wanted one. Despite the privileges that I benefited from, as the daughter of solicitors, it still didn’t seem like a place I would fit in. No one in my family had gone to Oxbridge and I was advised by a friend not to apply since “people like you don’t really get into Cambridge”. Despite achieving 11 A* grades at GCSE, I was not put into my school’s Oxbridge applicants’ group. It was only stumbling across the Black YouTuber Courtney Daniella, who studied at Cambridge, that my mind was changed. I messaged her, she encouraged me to apply, and here I am.
While my experience at Cambridge was overwhelmingly positive, there were moments of alienation, frustration and a lingering sense of imposter syndrome. When I arrived I was one of a handful of Black students at my college, Jesus (one of the more diverse). At first I felt excluded from the pre-existing friendships made up of students from elite schools. As a result, there were many times when I questioned if I had made the right decision. But I noticed a change, helped by Stormzy’s scholarship scheme.
It was only when I stumbled on a Black YouTuber who studied at Cambridge that I felt encouraged to apply
The most recent fresher cohort was by far the most diverse, and in the past year my own college has made two momentous decisions, by electing the first Black master of any Oxbridge college, and returning the Benin bronze (Okukor) statue to its rightful place in Nigeria.
While these changes are long overdue, they are perhaps a signal of the direction in which Cambridge and other universities are moving. As I start to think about a career in journalism, I can’t help feeling optimistic about the impact that this increased representation will have on the landscape of this and other professions. As my own journey has proved, you can’t be what you can’t see.
