This is a brief guide to how to approach an interview for a place at university. Given that English is my specialism, it is somewhat biased towards arts and humanities subjects but the same principles hold true whatever you're applying to study. Here are my five principles of good interview technique.
1. Make sure that you have considered some of the more abstract principles connected to your field of study.
Studying an A Level course often demands focus on quite specific sub-topics: English courses focus primarily on individual texts, History courses on particular periods and so forth. Syllabuses don't offer much encouragement to consider the broader, more abstract questions that pertain to each subject. It's always useful to consider what some of these questions might be. For example, the following questions make for interesting discussions as they encourage consideration of these principles:
* What distinguishes literature from other types of writing?
* How does one measure the health of an economy?
* Is it necessary to distinguish between the concepts of knowledge and belief?
Obviously, their potential answers extend far beyond the scope of the half-hour allotted for your interview. They therefore provide a good opportunity for a tutor to observe the logic with which you approach answering them. Your interviewer will be attentive to the precision of your language, asking you to clarify or exemplify particular ideas and asking subsidiary questions. Although you are free to discuss ideas drawn from your wider reading, these questions test how you think rather than what you know.
Interviewers might also ask you to reflect on your own experience of education. For example, you might be asked “how have you developed as a student of politics during the course of your sixth-form studies?”
These questions require you to think spontaneously so, although it is useful to practise answering this type of question, avoid giving answers that seem learned by rote and pay attention to the precise wording of each one.
2. Don't feel compelled to defer to the interviewer's authority.
In my first year at university, tutors sometimes remarked that my essays relied too much on expressing broad agreement with the views of literary critics and that I needed to 'strike out on my own'. Although affronted at the time, having taught English for fifteen years, I now have a measure of sympathy with my tutors' position.
A Level students can often be reluctant to disagree with the opinions of professional academics. In classroom discussions, many students are comfortable challenging dubious logic, factual mistakes or vague language in arguments made by their peers.
However, they are often less confident doing so if such mistakes are made by a teacher or published critic.
Unsatisfactory teaching at A Level sometimes encourages this needless deference to seniority. However, if you're going to hold your own in an interview, you need to break the habit. Interviewers often play devil's advocate to test the logic that informs your views and the extent to which you are prepared to defend them. This can sometimes appear confrontational but you should remain calm and respond to the challenge as rationally as possible. I can recall a mock-interview in my Upper Sixth year in which I was given a copy of 'The Dead' by Rupert Brooke and asked if I thought it was a good poem. I maintained that
“These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow...”
provided the poem with an emotionally powerful opening image.
“''Woven' and 'washed', eh?” needled my interviewer. “Like a pair of curtains?”
I didn't rise to his bait. Analysing these lines, I maintained that Brooke's combination of corporeal and emotional lexis encourages contemplation of how the psychological experience of military service manifests itself bodily. We initially read 'hearts' as a rather hackneyed synecdoche denoting 'valiant soldiers'. Brooke's use of 'woven', however, lets us envisage the muscles and other fibres that constitute those hearts in a literal sense. The poem seems to imply that those hearts bear the physical burden of 'human joys and cares', the weight of ideological expectation with which non-combatants have invested the mythic figure of the soldier. Alternatively, the phrase 'human joys and cares' might refer to each soldier's personal, emotional history, encouraging readers to consider the individual memories and emotions that each soldier took to the Front – the inner lives that were lost with each death. I was intrigued by the ambiguity as to who, precisely, was experiencing those 'joys and cares': the soldiers or the civilians for whom they fought. My memory falters a little here but I think that I also connected the phrase 'washed marvellously' to biblical accounts of purifying miracles and used this as a starting-point to examine the role that spirituality plays in the poem.
My arguments were, of course, challengeable and, for what it's worth, I can see flaws in Brooke's poem now in a way that I couldn't then. However, my point is that I could have backed down sheepishly in deference to my interviewer's seniority. Equally, I could have lost my composure, rattled by his flippant remark about the curtains. Nothing would have been gained by either approach and I managed to think on my feet to mount a rational defence of Brooke's choice of imagery.
Interviewers don't often take quite so confrontational an approach but they will test the rationale that informs your opinions, sometimes playing devil's advocate. Be prepared to defend your views with logic and evidence. However, you should also be receptive enough to these qualities to modify your own opinion if your interviewer makes a reasonable point.
Universities are not looking for applicants who automatically agree with whatever argument a tutor might present, nor for those who necessarily share their tutors' academic enthusiasms.
However...
3. Don't confuse a controversial opinion with an interesting one.
This will strike some readers as very obvious advice indeed. However, I have encountered several people who have given bad advice to prospective applicants on the subject of 'originality', advice which I feel needs debunking.
Applicants often feel pressured to express views that are 'original'. This is an unhelpful way of approaching your application. The desire to say something 'original' can lead applicants towards contriving intentionally outlandish or hyperbolic views which they themselves can't defend.
Students who can think precisely and approach questions creatively will, of course, tend to take discussions in novel and interesting directions. However, no interviewer expects a sixth-former to express opinions that have never been previously articulated. Applicants who attend interviews armed with intentionally controversial opinions are seldom accepted onto their courses and the few who are often risk looking foolish if they continue that approach as undergraduates. For example, it is particularly irritating to hear interviewees dismissing canonical texts or widely-esteemed writers as 'over-rated' in an effort to appear iconoclastic.
Rather than aspiring to holding original opinions, it is preferable to think in terms of developing your arguments in terms of their subtlety and detail and testing them against potential counter-arguments. Think also about how, rather than covering well-trodden territory, you might explore interesting aspects of the subject about which little or no criticism has been published. Being excited by the opportunity to engage with unfamiliar ideas is a sign of someone who will thrive at the best universities.
4. Make sure that you have a detailed knowledge of the subject areas discussed in your personal statement.
Once again, this is obvious advice but your interviewer will assume that you have a detailed knowledge of the wider reading you discuss in your personal statement.
I have sometimes encountered applicants whose personal statements might discuss a particular novel but, when asked a question about a textual detail, have to admit that they haven't finished reading it yet. Applying to study English (or other subjects in the humanities) isn't a test to measure who has read the most works of canonical literature. Interviewers will, of course, look for applicants who have read widely beyond the syllabus but, primarily, you will be assessed on your ability to say insightful things about the texts that you have read that don't feature on the A Level curriculum. For example, it is acceptable for an applicant who is interested in literary modernism to express interesting opinions on To the Lighthouse, The Waste Land and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley but not to have yet attempted reading Ulysses. It is likewise fine for an applicant to have thought precisely about the benefits and disadvantages of redistributive economic models without reading (or claiming to have read) Capital from cover to cover.
Make sure that you re-read the texts you discuss in your personal statement – selected passages therefrom, at least – in advance of your interview. Having read Middlemarch in Year 12, I appreciated some of the subtleties of Eliot's writing more keenly when I re-visited it the following autumn.
5. Put yourself in the interviewer's position: what would you look for from an interviewee?
My final piece of advice is to think about what an interviewer wants to see in an applicant. Your interviewer may well be teaching you for a significant portion of your time at university. They therefore want to offer a place to someone whose company they will find stimulating. Having supervised plenty of applications over the years, these are the five qualities that most successful applicants share:
* An investigative temperament, always looking to develop the subtlety and detail of their understanding
* The ability to use language precisely
* A willingness to learn from their mistakes
* Intellectual independence – a sense that they are studying the subject to feed their own deep curiosity
* A broad-mindedness, manifest in an ability to focus on learning about areas of the subject which are not of immediate, obvious interest to them
I hope that this piece has proved helpful.
Should you require a mock interview in English, please get in touch at swlondontutor@yahoo.com and I will be delighted to help. I am currently offering all tuition via Zoom and Skype.
I can also recommend the services of other experienced tutors in other subjects.
All the best with your application!
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