I’m often asked why I wanted to apply for Oxford and my first answer is usually that I didn’t. When I was first presented with Oxbridge after I received my GCSE results, I didn’t want to go. For me, it seemed like three years of loads of work and not much fun and, before I even got to the degree, the application seemed more trouble than it was worth. I was persuaded by my brother to apply – he’d also decided that three years of the most rigorous academia that the UK could supply wasn’t worth the bother when he’d been asked six years earlier, and had subsequently spent almost every weekend of his three year degree at another university visiting his friends at Oxford.
Still, I remained sceptical as to whether I’d apply until I started having some extra tutoring at school with my English teacher – after two tutorials with him, I’d decided I was going. The aim was to have a broad knowledge of a specific concept or link across time after mock-up tutorials each week – I looked at modernism, and how John Donne’s Holy Sonnets bore similarities to the high modernism of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. I really enjoyed the tutorial atmosphere, and the fact that I led what we learnt about that specific week. Also, being in an environment where the person I was talking to was so passionate about what we discussed persuaded me that this was how I wanted to learn as an undergraduate.
However, applications are very long and very intensive. Lots of my peers were intending to apply when we broke up at the end of Lower Sixth for various reasons – their mum said they should, they thought they’d have a punt, their teachers told them to – and when we got back and started actually doing the work for it, almost all of them dropped out. Ultimately, if you don’t really want to go to Oxford, you won’t get in – it’s not worth it if the only ones actually invested are your parents. Oxbridge personal statements are submitted through UCAS like other applications, and use the same personal statement, but have an earlier deadline, so early September can prove to be very stressful. I went through six drafts of my personal statement, and I know that I will never be that intelligent again in my life. However, while the person in my personal statement didn’t sound like me, the important thing is that I knew exactly what I was talking about even if I couldn’t verbally express myself like that. When it comes to interview, personal statements are the only thing you can really prepare for in an otherwise impossible-to-prepare-for situation, so having things in there you haven’t actually read, or don’t know is the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, maybe ever.
After entrance tests, you have your interviews. I had two interviews at the college I applied to, Trinity, and one at a different college, St Anne’s. At Trinity, one interview was on an unseen text, and the other was a more general interview about English and my interests in general. In the unseen Oxbridge interview I was taken to a room where I was given half an hour to analyse a poem, before being taken to talk through my analysis with two of the English tutors. The second was a more general tutorial, which I engineered to be about the topics I had covered in my personal statement. While my mum had asked me how I would go about explaining the concept of a Victoria Sponge to an alien (she listened to all the interview horror stories she could), I didn’t get anything like that. If tutors do ask something outlandish, it’s a case of them trying to see how you cope with the unexpected and wanting to hear your thought process aloud – they don’t expect you to have a perfect answer.
The tutors want to get to know applicants because the entire process is about seeing whether you’d be right for the tutorial style of teaching at Oxbridge: judging your disposition and personality to see if you’d cope with the work but also with the tutors, as they don’t want to teach someone who will struggle, or react badly to failure, for three years. What they do want, is someone who is genuinely enthused about their subject and has the mental flexibility to adapt their ideas as well as the belief in their own intelligence to defend their though process if pushed. If you come out of the interview relieved, but having enjoyed the experience overall, it’s a good sign. I came out having enjoyed the interviews and optimistic overall, but in all honesty after the first day I was ready to go home – it’s very tiring. However, I was pooled (transferred to a different college for another interview) to St Anne’s, so it was a challenge to keep the momentum going. Being pooled (or not) doesn’t give anything away in terms of predicting your success, so I can say with confidence and from the horse’s mouth – we all asked our tutors whether or not it meant anything – it genuinely means nothing.
I was fortunate to get an offer from Trinity (despite having been pooled), and having done part of my first year, it was definitely worth it. I feel very lucky to live with people who are *relatively* normal and completely lovely despite the Oxford horror stories I had heard, and are incredibly passionate about what they learn, as well as about learning in general. However, it is incredibly hard work. I completed more essays in my first eight-week term than my brother did in two years of his history degree, and you finish the term utterly exhausted. You have to learn how to say no to things: if you wanted, you could go to a talk, society, and a student production every night of the week as well as a choir or one of the newspapers and then going out with friends – while the opportunities are amazing, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. Ultimately though, Oxford – and Cambridge – are fantastic places to be and are worth applying if that’s what you want to do: I don’t regret my decision at all.
Ivy Education, 126 New Kings Road, London SW6 4LZ
+44 (0)207 736 6977
Previous Post
