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Colin Johnson’s blog


How I failed to get into Cambridge University

I applied and failed to get into Cambridge University when I was a teenager. I don’t care that I didn’t get in—I had three wonderful years at York instead. Nonetheless, I’m interested to think in retrospect about why this happened, whether my (very standard comprehensive) school could have done anything to prepare me better, and whether this situation still obtains twenty years later in schools similar to mine.

The positives. My school was very encouraging. They spent time with me honing my personal statement and writing what I assume was a decent reference.

The negatives. I think that the details matter. This is where the public schools have the advantage. Dammit, I could coach someone pretty well for Oxbridge admissions, despite having never been near the place except as a tourist.

One problem is that half-understood advice is sometimes as useless as no advice at all. I remember being told that I should read a little bit more around the subject, learn some things that were off-curriculum. If I was advising someone these days, I’d say the same thing—basically, that the prospective candidate should read some of the more challenging popular science books in their subject. However, I didn’t really know what this meant, so I went to the local library, which had a couple of maths books that weren’t school textbooks or similar. I read a book entitled something like “maths for business”—the first part was all about linear programming, which I learned in some detail and found very interesting. At my interview I got the inevitable question about what I had been reading, in particular if I had read anything about maths, and said that I had read a book about “maths for business”. The interviewer said something slightly bemused like “you mean, how to calculate a mortgage, and that sort of thing?”. I replied with something like “no, not really”, but I couldn’t really articulate what the book was about, so that line of questioning faded out.

The detailed choice of words matters. If I had said “I’ve been reading a book that talks about this thing called linear programming” then I might have started an interesting conversation. This is exactly what can be coached carefully.

I also think that it is important to choose the right, illustrative examples; this is part of understanding the reasons for asking the question as well as just understanding the question. In a previous attempt to join the Establishment, when I applied for a scholarship to the local private school aged 11, I remember being asked at the interview about what I watched on TV. I waffled on about enjoying the A-team and Family Fortunes and so on. Of course, I was just as enthusiastic about watching Mastermind and Tomorrow’s World or whatever else would have been the appropriate—but I didn’t understand that this was important. I gave a very direct, off the top of my head answer, sampling essentially randomly from the set of possible answers, and it wasn’t the right one. Again, this could trivially be coached out, even without my having any understanding of why the “right answer” was right.

Is this still the case today? Perhaps. One great thing is that there are loads of websites where prospective students can meet online and discuss these issues, so obvious faux pas get trapped early on. But, I still worry—if I were interviewing a student, and they gave some waffle about a business maths book, would I look upon them as favourably as the student who had read Ian Stewart or Marcus de Sautoy and could engage with the ideas therein? Does the student who says that they’ve “enjoyed programming in HTML” deserve the opprobrium that they would get, even though this might have been precisely the term their teacher might have used? I’d hope to be able to tease out the genuine ignorance from the shibboleths, but I worry that I don’t always succeed.

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