Hi, my name is Jaina I'm a first year geographer at Queens' College and what you're
about to see is an example of a geography interview at Queens' College.
Hello, I'm Graham Denyer Willis please come in take off your jacket and make yourself at home.
If you've been invited for an interview, well done.
The interviews are just one part of the application process so they are nothing
to worry about. Try not to be nervous - I know it's really
hard. Don't feel like you have to dress a certain way or act a certain way in the
interview: just be yourself and try to relax.
We're thrilled to have you herefor the interview we're gonna have about 20 minutes to discuss a number of
questions: I will ask you some questions and then Rachael will ask you some
questions and our effort really is not to prove you wrong or to figure out what
you don't know well we want to do is get a sense of who you are, what you're
passionate about in geography and why you would like to be a part of our
community. Is that okay? Yeah great so I will ask you some questions and at the end you'll
have the chance to ask us any questions that you might have.
At Queens' College there is a geography interview that lasts between 20 and 30 minutes but at
different colleges this changes and it obviously it's different for different
subjects too so you may have multiple interviews and your interview may also
last different amounts of time. Our first question is can you tell us what about
geography comes to you from where you you come from? So the main thing for
me is I live in London which is like a world city and I think that's
quite key to my identity. Obviously it is a melting pot of lots of different
cultures and lots of different people you get people living from different
social classes on the streets right next to each other and lots of different
cultures interacting every day.
In the interview you will be talking about your
subject out loud which might not have been something that you've done before
so it might be a good idea to practice either with a teacher or a parent so
that you can familiarize yourself with an interview type of environment.
So the city is an important theme in geography and in the study of cities in geography
we're very interested in questions of inequality: why or how do you see that in
the way that you approach or understand London?
I'm Graham Denyer Willis
I'm the Fellow in geography here at Queens' which we also call the Director of Studies.
Our objective in doing these interviews informally is not to catch you out
or try to figure out what you don't know or why you shouldn't be at Queens'.
What we really want to get from you is a sense of your passion for the subject.
When we're asking you questions we don't want to know what you don't know, we want
to get a sense of how you are curious, which kinds of ideas motivate you.
I think it's quite a key part of London's identity, it's something that's widely
discussed as well in London politics and you get sort of a working class
that feels under-represented in politics in London and then you have sort of the
quite wealthy, white-collar professionals which umm...
exist!
The interview is just a chance to get to know you so if the interviewers ask you
questions about topics that you don't know or you're unsure about anything
feel free to ask them to expand on the questions or let them know that you
haven't yet studied those topics in school and just try and give it your
best shot if you can.
Could you repeat the question, sorry? That's fine, yeah.
So you might have noticed that
sometimes answers to questions seem like they didn't get the
full distance and in other times we have a conversation that moves much
longer. Both of those things are fine, they're okay - it's not one thing is right
or the other thing is wrong. No one knows everything and we don't want to
seek that in individuals themselves. So seeing the stark contrast between wealth
directly is quite shocking. I don't know it sort of raises questions to me
about why this is allowed to happen in such a wealthy country and
especially within such a wealthy city. What kinds of questions does it raise
for you then? Questions about if it's morally acceptable to treat certain residents in
our city or our country with different levels of respect, I guess,
because if the homeless people are just allowed to live there and
they're not receiving any support from the government and surely that
shows that the government doesn't care about them as much as it does about say
wealthier residents. If you keep in mind as well that when we're
doing the interview we're excited to meet you
and to get a sense of who you are and why you might want to come to Queens'.
So I picked this up on the way here today on the street in Cambridge and I
wondered if you could talk to me about what you perceive this to mean about geography?
I'm Dr. Rachael Turton. I'm a teaching associate here in Queens'
College for the physical geography part of the course. So when you're invited to
interview at Queens' there'll probably be two people that interview you. You might
get some very broad questions and you might get some more very specific
questions and these might be on human geography topics, they might be on
physical geography topics but it doesn't really matter so much what your
knowledge base is - what we're trying to do is get to know you and get to know
what what it is about geography that you're passionate about, so prepare for
coming to the interview with your passions about geography whether that's
physical geography or human geography. So, it's clearly a plastic water bottle that
someone's drunk out of. If you found it on the side of the street I would imagine someone had
just sort of thrown it away mindlessly so that sort of raises issues about
recycling and plastic pollution I think there's been a lot in the media and sort
of it's been brought to the attention of lots of people in this country, the current
issue with our use of plastic and plastic waste. I think people are really
trying to make a conscious effort right now to reduce their plastic waste sort
of fueled by things in the media like newspaper headlines and
documentaries like David Attenborough documentaries social media as well so
people realise that when they're sort of buying plastic like that single-use
plastic and throwing it away it has really big impacts which they wouldn't
necessarily associate with it when they buy it, such as impact
on the turtles in the oceans far away. The aim of the interview is not to catch
you out: you get to talk about the topics that you are interested in and things
that you've written on your personal statement so make sure that ahead of
your interview you have a quick look over your personal statement and refresh
any ideas that you have about things that you've talked about within your personal statement.
Good very good great. So I think we're close to the end,
I wonder if you have any questions for us? No questions. Great thank you very much
for coming in - it's nice to meet you and we look forward to hopefully seeing you soon.
Thank you very much.
We hope you found this video useful and giving you an insight into
what interviews are like here at Queens' College. For more information feel free
to look at the Queens' College website for information on courses and more interview information.