Results are out!

A Message from our Director

I can imagine a day like 15th January would be filled with mixed feelings to the extremes – some elated and some huge disappointments.

Getting into Oxford or Cambridge is no easy feat and a big achievement. However for some of us who hold ourselves to the highest of standards, it could be the first time we have ever failed at a goal. I won’t keep it a secret – I cried the day I received that rejection letter from Yale when everyone including my housemistress, my dear cheerleader, kept reminding me of how perfect I would be for an Ivy League with all the extra-curriculars I did and the contributions I made to the school.

There are so many tales of successes and times where it felt like all my past years of sitting in a library and slaving away over my books and computer, instead of outside in the sun playing with my friends, were really worth it. But also plenty of curve-balls and temporary failures, the key word, I believe after all these years, being ‘temporary’.

I remember repeating to myself a famous Japanese saying: “Knock down seven times, get up eight”. This is just the seventh time you’re knocked down but you will get up: in the form of going to your second choice university and coming out top in class, perhaps it is a university in London which allowed you to discover your love for fine dining and become a restaurateur, or it’d be reapplying a second time knowing you were so close as you were pooled – 2 of my pooled students reapplied during their gap year and got in. The admissions process is also not a flawless system with plenty of brilliant students being rejected – at the very end of it, it is a game of luck and who your competition was in that college, in that year.

Let’s look to the new year with new hope of a very eventful year, for most it’d be starting a new university in a new country with new friends and for others – a year of self-discovery and new-found ambition!

For those of us celebrating, I wish you a very Happy and Prosperous New Year of the Rat!

Best regards,