Authors: Mary Beard
Oxbridge interviews: real advice from a real don
8 December 2008
This week marks the start of the Oxbridge interview season. I’ve been watching with interest from the USA as newspapers peddle
advice to anxious applicants and their parents about how they might best get through the ordeal – and especially about how
to deal with all those weird questions that we dons do like to devise to trip up the poor candidates.
More often than not, the information is being fed to the press by Oxbridge Application Advisory companies, which make their
money out of increasing the Oxbridge mystique, then claiming to offer a way through the applications jungle.
Feel some sympathy for Oxford and Cambridge, please. While we do our best to demystify the process and explain why interviews
are useful (can
you
think of a better way of distinguishing two students, both with 10 A*s at GCSE and predicted four As at A level?), other people
have a financial stake in making it all seem as complicated as possible.
One company is charging £950 for an interview preparation weekend, which is just one small part of the ‘Premier Service’ (covering
everything from advice on your personal statement to 14 hours’ personal tuition to promote independent thinking), for which
they don’t even quote a price on the web; you have to phone, which I haven’t. I can’t imagine the price is far short of the
just over £3000 annual fees for being taught at Cambridge. To be fair to this company, you
can
apply for their access scheme, a much shorter version, if you receive Educational Maintenance Allowance – though how many
people are given this is not clear. Perhaps it depends on how many spare places they have once the fee-payers have paid their
fees.
So what is my advice?
OK, I can’t speak for science subjects, but for humanities – three things.
First, don’t worry about the weird questions. We don’t sit round each year and dream them up over the port (port – another
myth, for the most part). ‘I know, Humphrey, why don’t we ask them if they can imagine what it was like being a strawberry
... That’ll sort the sheep from the goats, eh?’
If the questions sound a bit unexpected, that is what they are meant to be. It’s partly to prevent people being drilled in
the ‘right answer’ at ambitious schools or on those fee-paying courses. So don’t be misled by all those people who try to
tell you that what ‘they’ are really after when they ask you ‘How does Geography relate to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
’ (‘a wonderful chance to show you can adopt an interdisciplinary approach’). It really isn’t like that. Worse still, don’t
try to second-guess what the agenda is. Engage in the conversation, trusting that the person asking the question is trying
to get the best out of you.
Second, ask yourself: what would
I
be looking for in an applicant for this subject to this university? The application process isn’t rocket science. If someone
asks you what you have read about your chosen subject outside of your A level syllabus, and you say ‘Nothing’, it’s not a
great start. Arts courses at Oxbridge demand huge amounts of reading and an engagement with the written word. Be able to talk
about something you have read, independently, that has engaged you, whether it’s a battered 1950s text book you found in the
chuck out pile at the school library, or a 3 for 2 offer at W. H. Smith.
Third, don’t put your faith in profit-making companies that promise to help you ‘get in’, and claim that they have advice
from sources close to the mysterious decision-making. (Sorry – if you already have shelled out vast amounts of money, it probably
hasn’t actually done you any harm, but there might have been better ways of spending your money!) No one I know who is really
close to the admissions process would sell themselves to a private company.
I took a look at the ‘Advisory Board’ of one of these organisations. The descriptions were strictly accurate, but still gave
a misleading impression of intimacy with the system. One of the advisers was described as ‘a former schoolteacher Fellow of
Magdalene, Cambridge, specialising in admissions’. OK, but ‘schoolteacher Fellows’ are teachers who come to a college for
a term, on sabbatical from a school. They may have an interest in admissions, but they have nothing at all directly to do
with them. Another had been involved in admissions in a ‘Permanent Private Hall’ at Oxford (which is not quite the same as
a college). Another was an interesting cultural theorist – who most likely had once been involved in admissions at a post-graduate
college at Oxford, but I couldn’t discover which exactly (Google was a bit unclear on this).
Why not instead take advantage of what is available outside the commercial sector? The Sutton Trust arranges courses with
an eye to Oxbridge and to other top-rank universities (Oxbridge isn’t the be-all and end-all). A friendly teacher can almost
certainly help to get you a practice interview (and honestly, you don’t need a whole weekend of it).
In fact, the Cambridge website gives you an example of what an interview is like; and it’s made by those who REALLY know.
I’d start there.
Comments
This post has made me feel a lot better about being in the minority of Oxbridge applicants who HAVEN’T been to one of these
interview weekend things – nearly everyone at my school seems to have paid for some kind of preparation!
So thank you for allowing me to have more faith in my decision of spending the time I would have used at a preparation weekend
reading, and the money on shoes ...
And thank you for calming my nerves this morning, as I’m about to leave for my first Cambridge interview!
ANON
When you do these weekends, you are only getting what people at good private schools get as a matter of course. A friend of
mine who went to Brighton College while Seldon was in charge got put through about seven mock interviews each more frightening
than the next. With teachers they didn’t know. What good practice, compared to someone who’s never done anything like it.
And we definitely got similar help at my school. Whereas a girl I know who had gone to a private, but unacademically ambitious
Steiner school, finally got into Oxford (second time round) after taking one of the courses you are discussing. She felt it
was worth every penny.
PS At my interview I knelt in front of the door and listened through the oak to the person before me getting grilled. He was
having a Middle East peace process nightmare.
When I got in there, the famous expert on Italian politics put on a slightly jazzy record, told me to sit down, offered me
a grape, and said, ‘Do you have any questions for me?’ ... Sometimes I think they have made up their mind before you get there
...
EMMA T
I did well enough at the interview to be asked back for a second chance, at which I made it, despite my cheap suit and naivety
and coming from a Middlesbrough school with no Oxbridge record and not even knowing our Latin master had been to the very
college I was applying for (about which he was quite peeved). And I can’t remember any weird questions. All I can remember
is quoting some poem in French and not knowing what ‘trite’ meant (after a bit of close reading/
explication de texte
).
So not to worry. Competition has probably got more professional/slicker since then, but brains haven’t.
XJY
I can’t remember much about my interview with you except being asked about women in the classical world and at the turn of
the century. The question horrified me, having given up history in Year 9 ... but you still let me in and for this I am extremely
grateful!
RUTH P
Hm, as an ex-Oxford student now teaching at Cambridge, I can vouch that what MB says sounds spot-on to me. During my DPhil
I did a lot of exam coaching for slacker teenagers with rich parents: in not one case did it make a blind bit of difference.
The bright ones remained bright, the thick ones stayed thick and did not get in.
MARK W
I think you’re probably right about the port being a myth. I phoned an old friend on Sunday who decided to settle in Oxford
after his many teaching stints abroad and he told me that dinner in college was pretty well a thing of the past. Lunch, he
said, was a quasi-business meeting, with ‘people exchanging papers over the shepherd’s pie’ and only water to drink. My guess
is that many of the younger dons don’t even know what port is. Reminds me of Basil Fawlty (complaining about a socially inferior
guest): ‘Wouldn’t know the difference between a claret and a Bordeaux.’
ANTHONY ALCOCK
At High Table in my college – where I believe MB has dined on occasion – the port certainly isn’t a myth!
MARK W
OK, Mark ... there is some occasional port hidden away in Cambridge nooks.
MARY
Whether or not port’s a myth, I was offered sherry by one of my Oxford interviewers. Mind you, that was over thirty years
ago. I almost fainted from delight at the perfection of it all – comfy room, chatting about
Paradise Lost
as we sipped, and there was even a fluffy cat on a cushion. I wasn’t accepted, though.
RUTH
18 December 2008
Remember those ‘inbox’ tests they used to make people do at job interviews? The candidate was sat down in front of a made-up
collection of letters, notes and demands that might be lying in their inbox on their first day in the job and asked to prioritise!
The idea was to see if they would rank buying the boss’s wife an anniversary present in front of fixing up a meeting with
the managing director. I was never quite sure what the right answer was supposed to be ... or if there was one.
Well, I thought you might be interested to see what a real life donnish inbox looked like: the electronic version, I mean.
California is a good place for reflecting on one’s email. By the time you get up in the morning most of the European messages
for the day are already waiting for you.
So, what does the gathered harvest of yesterday look like? It was in fact rather a thin crop. It’s nearly Christmas and well
past the end of term – so there were none of the usual apologies/excuses for students (‘Sorry – my essay WILL be in your pigeonhole
by 5.00, Susie xxxxxxx’) and the usual administrative stuff of the working week. So treble this for the mid-term picture.
First in the box was good news ...
1
An email from a friend who has just been appointed to be Director of the American Academy in Rome. A nice comment, I reflected,
on passing years. I remember when we got all excited because our friends had got
scholarships
there. Now they’re becoming the bloody director ...
2
Domestic note from the husband. Largely concerned with delivering the 90th birthday card to my old teacher.
3
Ditto
.
4
Ditto
– plus re. the vegetable order.
5
Message from BBC World Service about an interview I’m doing next week on Google Earth’s Ancient Rome, confirming time and
place.
6
Message from Oundle Literary Festival wanting attractive donnish photo of self for their programme.
7
Copy of message from husband to colleague in Canada, where we are both going in the spring for a couple of lectures.
8
Message from editor and fellow blogger, to whom I’d sent the draft of a long review that I wasn’t very happy with. He thought
it needed more work too. (Damn – you always faintly hope that someone else might just think it brilliant, even if you don’t
yourself.) In this case the problem is that I’m too close to the subject, so it gets a bit anal. Looking at it again I decided
that I needed to start from the anecdote I ended with (isn’t that always the way?) ... so that’s the job for the airport this
afternoon.
9
PS note from fellow blogger re. my newly austere, healthy, weight-losing lifestyle. The truth is that redoing that review
might well test the resolve.
10
Message from blog reader in Germany with intriguing query about Latin love stories. I’m always happy to get these – so long
as they are not the kind of queries that could easily be answered by a quick Google trawl. So I send off a speedy response.
11
Message from friend about recent blog post. ‘Causing trouble again,’ he said.
12
Query from student at another UK university asking me if I thought that Roman institutions owed a lot to the Etruscans. It
was a follow-up question to something I had written, so I banged off a reply.
13
Confirmation of Canada arrangements.
14
Copy of message sent around the members of the Cambridge Leverhulme project I’m involved with. They are going on an outing
to the British Museum and can’t quite work out whether the 7.45 train from Cambridge will get them there in time (academics
...!)
15
Confirmation of confirmation of Canada.
16
More train stuff.
17
An email containing a link to a pdf of something I’m meant to be reading for a meeting in January.
18
Message forwarded from the husband – a weird complaint about his Byzantium show at the Royal Academy.
19
Christmas greetings from the European Research Council.
20
More train stuff.
21
Message from the
National Geographic
. I had given them a blog entry about the most important discovery of 2008. They don’t think Obama counts as a discovery,
so can I suggest something else? I have a quick search and send them Augustus’ house on the Palatine.
22
Circular message from Cambridge Faculty Administrator, telling us all that our ‘800th Anniversary’ lapel pins are in our pigeonholes.
I haven’t a clue what these are, but assume that someone has had the bright corporate idea that all Cambridge staff will celebrate
the uni’s birthday by wearing a badge. Not likely.
23
Message from friend to say that we can’t meet when I hoped.
24
Message from San Francisco radio station who want to fix up a discussion about Pompeii from Cambridge (yes odd, I know, when
am in SF).
25
More train stuff.
26
Ditto
.
27
Ditto
.
28
Pdf of wonderful pictures for a piece on Pompeii in the magazine
Historically Speaking
.
29
Query from student in Ireland interested in the Cambridge Classics MPhil. Wrote straight back with some answers.
By this time my hard work at clearing was beginning to be self-defeating. For numbers 30 and 31 were replies from numbers
10 and 12.
If anyone would like to tell me what all this says about modern electronic life, I’d love to know.