Joel

The possibility of applying to Oxford or Cambridge was first mentioned to me by my personal tutor who had himself read for a postgraduate degree at St Johns. Prior to that, though I was certain I wanted to go on to higher education I hadn’t really given much thought to Oxbridge.

To find out more about Oxford I applied to the Sutton Trust Summer School and was accepted. I spent a whole week in Oxford sampling the life of a physics undergraduate, including included a mock one-on-one tutorial. Whilst I realised that I wasn’t exactly into university-level physics, I really took a liking to Oxford as a city and to the style of teaching I had experienced especially the focus on students as individuals rather than as a generic collective.

The following September I decided to apply to study Law at Oxford. After spending a couple of hours looking through the prospectus I chose St Peter’s – principally because of its central location and its offer of accommodation for all three years. As a part of the application process for law Oxford expects all candidates to sit the National Law Admissions test (LNAT). This is normally held at your local driving test centre and consists of 30 multiple choice questions and an essay – I did a bit of preparation for this by attempting a couple of practice papers from a book which was in the college library – a quick Amazon search will throw up a few such books.

My sixth form college was large (around 1600 students), so it usually had about 20 Oxbridge applicants each year. On returning to interview it asks students to fill out a debrief form describing the interview experience. Previously completed forms for our subject were given to us by the college so we would have a broad idea of what to expect at the interviews.

In terms of preparation, for law there is not really that much you can do – much of what you will be asked in interview is aptitude-based. It is not like other subjects where there is a knowledge base which you are expected to have. The only real preparation I did was to read a broadsheet newspaper each day to keep abreast of current affairs – something which did in fairness come in handy during my second interview.

My first interview was with the two law tutors at St Peter’s and was the more law-based of the two. I was eased into the interview by a few questions about what the extra-curricular activities I had outlined on my personal statement. I was given a card with an imaginary (pretty straightforward) statute written on it and was then presented with a number of hypothetical scenarios to which I had to apply the statute. The final part of the interview comprised a mini-debate on a matter of public policy – in my case the issue was whether smoking should be banned in public places.  Throughout the interview the tutors presented counterarguments to some of the answers given.

The second interview was with the tutor for admissions and was far broader than the first. It was far more discussion-based than I expected it to be – topics we discussed included the underlying purposes of law, civil liberties, and the adequacy of Parliament. I was also asked to talk about the cartoon in that day’s Guardian. These topics were by no means typical though – from speaking to the other interviewees the second interview seemed to be based around their own prior studies and interests. My interview was rather politics based because I was studying A-Level politics. A Northern Irish applicant was asked about the peace process, and somebody else who was asked about the coast of the Isle of Wight, which he had mentioned he had visited on a Geography fieldtrip.

Whilst not actually in the interviews we [the law interviewees] sat in the JCR for hours on end, walked around Oxford, went to the Pitt Rivers Museum, and on two evenings went to a local pub.

Coming out of the interviews I was unsure of my chances of getting a place – I hadn’t found them as difficult as I had been led to believe them to be, but the three days I spent in Oxford were really enjoyable and reinforced the feeling that I would love to spend three years here, a feeling I still have to this day…