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<p>Seconded! ;-)</p>
<p>All these programs are so hyper-competitive that one needs to have an ideal plan setup (with good backups) but, as yuiop mentioned, there’s also an element of ‘you take what you can get’ in all of this hence why most apply to many different major fellowships at once, even if they need to have slightly different study plans for each. This is in the same way that most people apply to many different undergraduate schools even though their exact proposed course of study at each school may be a bit different. </p>
<p>If one really has their heart set on a masters at Oxford and a masters at Cambridge, but you get dinged by the Marshall and accepted by the Rhodes I think you’d be a fool to turn it down (because, God forbid, you’d have to spend an extra year at Oxford)… to a certain extent you take what you can get.</p>