And we've started a free, student-led website to
give everyone, no matter who they know access to insights on the cambridge
application process written by successful Cambridge applicants.
There's some people who know people studying at Cambridge or maybe
they have schools that are quite familiar with the process and to them it's I
guess quite natural applying and quite obvious but there's a huge demographic
of people both within the UK and an awful lot outside the UK as well, they
just don't have any access to students they can talk to and find out what is it like.
And I think actually when you're coming at the the process as
an applicant you realise that's a sort of spectrum of information with at the
one end the official information that you're going to get from the University
itself and that's really useful and obviously you're going to use that as
you're going through but it can be a little bit sterile and it doesn't
actually give you everything that you need to give it your best shot.
At the other end when you actually want to hear what students have said;
you've got to go to a sort of unmoderated chat rooms and so I suppose
what we're trying to do is get something that goes between those two things:
you can still hear what students have to say and you can get that student voice
that's so useful and comforting to applicants but also that's reliable.
So broadly speaking the information falls into two places, you've
got the first one which is we just said to a lot of students: 'Can you talk about
your interview, your application?' and we've just made a big database of these
first-time student testimonies of what it's like. And then the second part is
just a database of what's out there; so we're not a mentorship scheme but
there's plenty mentorship schemes out there, plenty of scholarships people will
take advantage of and putting those on the site and giving them visibility.
So for example in the case of the interview which is what we've got I
think 700 students have submitted theirs so far and they've told us roughly
what the format of their interview was, how many interviews there were,
if they had any tests, where they sat in the periods between the
interviews, what sort of sweets they had you know, all of these sort of details
and they've also told us a bit about what they discussed. So we're not telling
people specific questions because that might stress people out if you
think that you need to actually know specific answers to specific questions
which is not the case and then we've also got what people wish they'd have known
in advance, something they wish they'd been told by
by someone before coming up to interview and also the best preparation they
thought they did before they came and the kind of few things they did that
they thought that really helped me when I came for interview.
I think there's quite a big misconception, people hear 'interview' and they think of
a job interview or something formal but interviews are by and large more like
conversations than interviews and actually you can't go away and learn;
okay this was what will come up, this is what will come up and to make sure that what
we've got on the site is useful we've got a team of really brilliant student
editors and moderators who go through all of our content and adding in little
tags which pop up if something comes up that's not understandable or is
difficult to understand or might be unhelpful and also removing specific
questions and just leaving general ones. So for example if you asked you know
what was the impact on the last general election of the first-past-the-post
voting system we might change that to we discussed voting systems so you still
know the kind of scope of what we're talking about and what what the person
did talk about an interview but it's not gonna make you feel like you need to go
away and revise specific types of voting systems in specific years so it's really
just giving people a general impression as opposed to specifics they need to revise.
I think one of the most interesting things has been how
different all of the responses and have been that we've got. It's not like
there's one specific type of question that people are asked or one type of
interview that you're going to get when you come up here, it's actually that
depending on what you've studied at school or the things that you find most
interesting, all the things that you actually want to talk about, that's
exactly what the interviewers are going to pick up on and want to talk to you more
because they want the best discussion possible and that's probably what you're
going to be good at talking about. So I think it's been interesting to see how
individualised all of the interviews are. Although if there was one thing that
is common to all of them, it's that lots and lots of people
think it went terribly and that they didn't get in and they would never come back to Cambridge.
At least 70% of the ones I've read were like that so I think it's important
to realise also that if you thought it went really badly there's still hope.
I was talking to somebody. She was saying during her Skype interview
the internet just kept cutting out
but they still actually had a conversation and even when these things
aren't always perfect or I the interview isn't always this
kind of completely what you expect.
Yeah, it's not all about slick questions, slick answers, coming in a well-cut suit
and doing some sort of James Bond-style interview. I think it's
actually about just having a normal conversation.
Well attempting to have a normal conversation about something but you're actually interested in.
Yeah so it's not always what it's made out to be.
I think it's important to recognise that whilst it's us two speaking now it's a real team effort.
Yeah, there's so much more here, it's not just two people sitting at a table.
On a sort of weird date.
It's whole community of students.
Students, admissions tutors and that's been really encouraging to think that actually even
though we've tapped into a good idea then this could be carried on well beyond us.