Interview training is imperative
At one point in my first meeting at the school, Isabelle was
waved in – a confident girl wearing black jeans and white Converse trainers,
with wavy blond hair that she dyes a reasonably convincing ginger. After being
introduced, she asked me what she could do to prepare for an application to
Oxford and other prestigious universities like Imperial, Manchester and UCL. I
didn’t have a good answer ready, but later that night I emailed friends who had
also studied at Cambridge. I asked them all: what would you tell her?
“Interview training is imperative,” replied a friend who now
works in the City of London. “If you have never been in a situation where
someone is challenging your intellect/interest/whole identity, such a massive
part of it is just retaining your cool.” Others offered tips about preparatory
reading, or emphasised the importance of making sure the students have the
confidence to apply in the first place.
A few weeks later, Sackville’s head of sixth form, Helen
Valentine, assembled 10 of her highest-achieving year 12s, including Isabelle.
They sat in front of me around a U shape of desks in a computer room, wearing
casual clothes and chatting among themselves.
For those who wanted to apply for Oxford or Cambridge, or to
study medicine, the deadline was about six months away. These students became
known among teachers as the “Oxbridge group”, but everything we were doing was
supposed to work for Bristol, Durham and all the other Russell Group
universities they were applying to at the same time. I told them I would try to
give them something approximating the support students from private schools
get. We would meet every week or two to talk about their subjects. They seemed
receptive, but didn’t ask any questions. I tried to project confidence about
the whole thing, because I knew how important a commodity confidence was going
to be. But naturally, I also had some doubts.
When she was in year 8, Isabelle remembers telling three
friends that she wanted to study science at Oxford. She was half joking, half
dreaming, she says. “It didn’t seem real, to be honest. It was very much
something that people like me didn’t do.”
Five years later, Isabelle and those three friends were all
in our little group, including Lucy, applying to study English at Cambridge.
Also in the group was Eren, a tall, unflappable young man who spends his
weekends either working at a garden centre or climbing sheer rock faces. He
grew up in Croydon, south London, before his parents moved to Sussex (his
father works in construction and his mother is a yoga teacher). He has a
similar memory to Isabelle: aged 13, he told a girl sitting next to him in
science class, “I want to do physics at Cambridge”, but remembers thinking,
“That’s not really going to happen, is it?”
After the visit to
Cambridge, they felt they had a really good chance, the ones who really wanted
it
There were definitely times in my months working with the
students when it felt as if it wasn’t going to happen. My notes for the early
meetings sometimes just say: “Didn’t email” or “Didn’t come”. I was spending a
lot of my time just persuading a few of the students that they were good
enough. Eren says the school’s track record played on his mind. “For however
many years, no one got in [to Oxbridge], so you think there must be a pretty
good reason for that.”
After a month or two, though, I started to have a good
feeling about the students. They had the kind of work ethic and grades that top
universities expect, and they seemed to enjoy the challenge we had been set. I
told them to get the list of
universities in uk for phd like a mini extra A-level as I told you:
something that requires a bit of work every week, reading interesting articles
about their chosen subjects, and learning how to talk about what they had read
when we met.
Ayo, Sackville’s head boy and one of its best footballers,
whose parents had come to England from Nigeria when he was small, prepared for
his application to Stanford in California by reading longform articles about
economics. Lucy read lesser-known short stories by F Scott Fitzgerald and made
interesting connections between them. Eren had been reading fairly advanced
books about physics since he was a teenager, and just needed reminding that
mentioning them in his application was a good idea. Sometimes our sessions were
about sharpening the students’ thoughts, or picking them up if someone or
something had knocked their confidence.
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