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College Success
(Admitted to Harvard) |
"I knew I had a good essay and my mother, who was an English major and has a law degree, helped me proofread it and also helped with the editing. However, we still wanted to have someone review the text and give us an objective & professional opinion. The response was quick and the feedback was invaluable. The suggestions helped to make the piece tighter, the message clearer and the transition smoother. I especially appreciated the assistance that provided my essay with the proper theme & conclusion, yet always maintaining the integrity of my original work. You helped me to find my voice with suggestions that inspired but did not overpower."
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Applying to
Oxford
By Brian Taylor , Oxford University
Content Provided by our
Friends at CampusNut.com. Visit
CampusNut
Applying to Oxford for an undergraduate course can be a complicated process. For a start, you have to apply to a particular college, and there are 29 of them for undergraduates. (Remember also that even prior to this, you have to choose Oxford over Cambridge - you’re not allowed to apply to both.) Some people do take the random approach, but most put some thought into the matter. They say you’ll be happy wherever you go, and indeed, most people would recommend their colleges, but there are factors to consider. Size, facilities, wealth (and hence living costs and grants available), location, age, number of tutors (the Oxford term for professors) in your subject, accommodation policy - all these differ from college to college, as do the character and atmosphere, which range from grand and palatial, to cosy and intimate.
They all offer open days when you can look around and meet tutors and undergraduates. But who can get a true impression of a place when all the warts and scars are carefully concealed? Only nice undergraduates are picked as helpers, and the tutors who are on hand to give you course information are invariably the wrong ones - you want to apply to do French and German, but you’re met by the Portuguese tutor, and have no idea whether his dark unfriendliness or sunny cheerfulness is representative of the teaching body as a whole.
After studying the college prospectuses and trying to concentrate on the facts, rather than private opinions, my choices were narrowed down to Christ Church and Queen’s. I went for an open day at Christ Church, the most famous Oxford college (grand old place, but chilly atmosphere and bad food) and looked through the entrance of Queen’s (nice front quad, with bright flowers around the lawns). What swung the balance for me, though, was the tutors. I was applying for French and German and wrote to the French tutor in each college, explaining my unusual educational background (didn’t go to school, you see). The man at Christ Church (who I’ve since heard wears leather trousers and dangly earrings - not important perhaps, but I’m still glad I didn’t go there) wrote back, but the tutor at Queen’s actually went to the trouble of finding my phone number through directory enquiries, and then calling me. So I decided to apply there.
About 85% of Oxford applicants are interviewed (about 1/3 of these being offered places), so it’s important to sound like a multi-talented genius on your application form, and to persuade your teachers to fabricate stories about your academic prowess. But then you have to back all that up in the interview.
At Queen’s, languages interviewees stay for 3 days in college, all board and lodging provided free. There are sessions run by current undergraduates to make you feel at ease and to give you information and tips. When I arrived, a spotty youth asked me, “Are you doing Russian?” When I said no, he said, without rancour, “Oh. Fuck off then.” I guess it broke the ice. “Be yourself!” is the main tip they gave us, although I guess most people would be too nervous anyway to start doing impersonations.
The selection process was in two parts: the written test and the interview. The test took place in the huge oak-panelled dining hall, everyone sitting at oak tables under the watchful eyes of past alumni on the walls. We had a paper (fiendishly difficult) in each language, designed to test grammatical knowledge.
As we filed in, the boy next to me asked what languages I was applying for. I told him French and German. He laughed. “So am I. I hate you.” “That’s alright. I hate you too.”
Actually, what languages a given candidate is applying for need make no difference as to whether you hate him/her or not. Oxford colleges accept candidates according to their ability only and there is no quota system. So theoretically, a year’s intake could consist only of French/German students, although, in practice, the best candidates tend to be spread out over the various languages.
The day of the interview itself, I spent the morning frantically making notes on German Novellen. An hour before my interview, I was given two poems, one in French, one in German. I had to choose one for discussion, and then would discuss general reading for the other language. Languages interviews at Queen’s last about 30 minutes, and each candidate is faced by all four languages tutors, so it can be an intimidating process, even though they may not all participate in the questioning.
I chose the French poem, one called ‘L’Hotel de Ville,’ about a soldier returning to his hometown in 1917. I made notes, looked up some words and then was ready to make my way to where the interviews were being held. As I waited outside to be called in, I could feel the adrenalin rushing through my body. Even the oily sensation which all the blockbuster novels talk about was in my stomach. When the German tutor finally opened the door, I jumped with nervous tension.
The young female French tutor started off the interview, asking me to read the poem aloud, and then asking several questions about the theme of the poem and the narrator. I managed to slip in a bit of literary cross-reference, mentioning Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which pleased me, if not them.
There was some discussion of the form of the poem and then she handed me over to the German tutor. “What have you read recently in German?” “Death in Venice, and some Kafka - Investigations of a Dog, which I particularly liked,” (heavy hint there - this was the story I wanted to talk about most since I had been re-reading it that morning) “Metamorphosis and Amerika.” “Well, if we take Amerika first then.”
I hadn’t read Amerika for a while, which was why I had mentioned it last and had tried to say it under my breath so that he wouldn’t choose it. But as he asked me questions about it, more and more of the story came back to me. Ideas came to my head all of a sudden. But they weren’t ideas that would shake the intellectual world. The German tutor did not produce a tape recorder to save them for posterity and for adding later to his next critical work. But they were ideas of a kind, and sounded fairly sensible at the time.
“Moving on a bit, if I were to put it to you that both Amerika and Die Verwandlung - to give it the original name - were both about power relations, what could you do with that?”
I had never considered such a thing. It was really “think-on-your-feet” time. Now I could show them my true mettle - or not. I looked thoughtfully off over his head. The nude on the wall, a rather tasteless collection of lines, possibly by Modigliani, gave me no help.
“Power relations,” I repeated. Not exactly brilliant, that.
“Yes,” he said, encouragingly. “Well, I.... guess they’re both about power relations, yes... and” (sudden flash of inspiration) “ the power relations are unsatisfactory in both cases in that... in that they are played out above the main characters’ heads. In neither story is the main protagonist in charge. Karl doesn’t know what’s happening to him and why. Gregor is locked in his room and cannot communicate with the others in any way. He has no say in what happens to him or his surroundings and can... can only look on as his sister and parents struggle for ascendancy.”
“Good!” He looked genuinely pleased that I had managed to come through that one. He asked a couple more questions and then we spoke some German, nothing too complicated, before the interview drew to a close.
I went along to a student’s room where some of the candidates and undergraduates were gathered together. “How did it go?” one of them asked. “Okay. I actually enjoyed it.” “You’re in then! If you liked it, it must have gone very well indeed.”
What I had said was not mere bravado. It was true - I had enjoyed the interview, once I had sat down and started talking. It is enjoyable to discuss something interesting with a highly intelligent person who is able to ask searching questions and respond appropriately to your answers. And in that question and answer process, in the discussion, your mind comes up with ideas and remembers things in a way it doesn’t do when you are sitting alone and racking your brains. The French tutor had told me nothing about the poem, but when we had finished discussing it, it was so much richer and more meaningful than when I had been looking at it beforehand. She had drawn it out of me. Similarly, the German tutor had shown me an approach and then allowed me to take that approach and follow it myself, albeit perhaps only a little way. By talking about the texts, my mind was jogged so that it remembered things, sharpened so that it could produce ideas.
And so it was now, after the interview, when I could no longer influence the selection process, that I truly appreciated the worth of an Oxford education. At Queen’s, the interview aims to try to duplicate the tutorial (the weekly essay-based discussion all students have with their tutor), so that tutors can see who is suited to that particular kind of education. It’s not a photographic memory they’re after, but a flexible and intelligent mind, along with the ability to express reasonable ideas fluently. Up to that time, if I had been asked why I was applying to Oxford, the facilities, accommodation, prestige and architecture would probably have been of equal importance to the educational opportunities. But now, those other aspects of Oxford life paled in significance to the main advantage of going to Oxford, namely being able to take part in a similar discussion every week, instead of just writing an essay and having it handed back with a mark and one or two comments. Having had some experience of it, I could see no better way of study.
Essentially, the only preparation for the interview is to make sure you know the texts you’ll be discussing. You can’t change the way your mind works overnight. If yours is an ‘Oxford’ mind and you’ve done the reading, then you stand a good chance. But be open-minded. You dance to the tutors’ tune. If they suspect you are trying to lead them in a given direction, they take another turning to thwart you. This is completely fair of course. What the interview does is test your skills at thinking on your feet, at reacting to unfamiliar lines of approach. They are not testing your ability to regurgitate information learned from a textbook or a teacher, so they avoid discussing books that they think the candidates want to discuss.
Just over a week later, the letter dropped onto the doormat. It was large, and I knew when I saw it that the size could only mean one thing: they had to be sending me information for the envelope to be so big. And so the undergraduate had been right. I was in.
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