Rejected from Cambridge; Automatically Out of the Running for Oxford?

[mayhemily]

I applied to the MPhil English Modern and Contemporary at Cambridge and got a rejection email today. I also applied to Oxford's MSt English 1900-Present program. However, I used different research proposals for both, with one focusing on the 1890s and the other focusing on the 1920s, but is it pretty much just a given that if I get rejected from Cambridge, I'll get rejected now from Oxford too, despite the different proposals? Please let me know what you think

[TakeruK]

No, there is no reason why being rejected from one program means you're automatically rejected from another. Unless there is something connected with these two programs that I don't know about since it's not my field?

But in general, admissions are very stochastic/random, especially at the top levels. This is why I generally do not recommend people apply to just one "dream" school. If you are shooting for your dream schools, then you should apply to like 4-5 of them! An example: Let's say these dream schools accept 5 people only. And let's say you're really good, you're actually in the top 25 of all applicants to these schools! But for one given school, you might be ranked 6th and not get an offer. If you had only applied to that school then you're out of luck! But if you apply to many schools, you have a higher chance of getting into the top 5. In addition, even if you end up being ranked 5th to 10th for all 5 schools, you might still get an offer because there is likely a lot of overlap between the top 5 students at these top schools and each student can only take one offer, opening up their spots to lower ranked applicants. But if you only apply to 1 or 2 schools, you might end up choosing schools where the spots didn't open up. So to increase your chances, you apply to as many schools as you can, so that the factors out of your control (i.e. which schools the other people choose to accept) are more likely to end up in your favour.