The Open Secret Podcast: How People Really Get Into Oxford, Cambridge, and the UK's Top Universities for Postgraduate Study
Getting into Oxford, Cambridge, and the UK's top universities for postgraduate study can feel like there's a secret code that everyone else was handed and you weren't.
There is. It's just that almost no one says it out loud! The Open Secret is the show that says it out loud.
Hosted by Dr Claire Bergstrom Johnson, a Clarendon Scholar, Oxford DPhil graduate and clinical research fellow, this podcast pulls back the curtain on how people actually win places and full funding at the world's most competitive universities. And Claire knows both sides of it intimately, because before the two fully funded Oxbridge offers, she received 20 graduate rejections in total. When she finally got in, she was the same person with the same grades - just a completely different rebuit approach.
Since then, she's helped thousands of applicants across more than eighty countries, and she's read the real successful postgraduate applications almost no one else gets to see, which means the guidance here isn't guesswork. It's the patterns behind what actually works!
Each episode gives you the honest, insider version of postgraduate admissions: the seven factors that decide how competitive you really are, why fit beats prestige, how funding actually works (and why it's half the battle), what a winning personal statement and reference letter look like, how to approach supervisors, and the mindset shifts that separate the people who get in from the people who talk themselves out of applying.
Whether you're already drafting your application or you're still wondering whether someone like you could ever get in, this is the resource Claire wishes she'd had before her own rejections.
Because the real question isn't whether it's possible. It's *why not you?*
New episodes weekly. For the full self-assessment and the resources mentioned in the show, head to oxbridgeadmissionsclub.com.
The Open Secret Podcast: How People Really Get Into Oxford, Cambridge, and the UK's Top Universities for Postgraduate Study
Latest Episodes
Your Grades Are Not Why Oxbridge Rejected You | Master's and PhD
In today's episode, I explain why your grades are almost certainly not the reason Oxford or Cambridge rejected you, we go through the four things that actually decide a postgraduate outcome, and I debunk the idea that you need insider connectio...
How I Got Into Oxford and Cambridge, Both Fully Funded, After 19 Rejections
In my first application cycle I sent off 11 applications and got 11 rejections, without a single interview, and I thought that was my answer.Then in the very next round, the same cycle where I collected eight more nos, Oxford and Cambri...
