HELP! I am being interviewed by Oxford (and am not posh)

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I received a letter this morning inviting me to an interview with the English department of St Johns College, Oxford. At the interview, I will be given a piece of unseen poetry or prose to discuss. I haven't really been exercising my critical muscles recently, so I need YOU to give me some suitably long/impressive words to casually drop in.

― emil.y (emil.y), Friday, 26 November 2004 10:43 (twenty-one years ago)

Logorrhea - say it but don't do it!

― Why Does Herr Dadaismus Run Amok? (Dada), Friday, 26 November 2004 10:44 (twenty-one years ago)

And concepts too. Things like "ironic appropriation of Georgian symbolism". Obviously, this is very unlikely to come up, but you never know.

I actually have to leave for my Latin class very soon. What the hell am I doing?

xpost logorrhea is good, unfortunately I do tend to do it (have you added it to the word poll?)

― emil.y (emil.y), Friday, 26 November 2004 10:47 (twenty-one years ago)

ALso, use "meh"

― mark grout (mark grout), Friday, 26 November 2004 10:48 (twenty-one years ago)

That's a must. And "teh".

― Why Does Herr Dadaismus Run Amok? (Dada), Friday, 26 November 2004 10:48 (twenty-one years ago)

Be sure to mention that you like Merzbow.

― It's hard to kill a horse with a flute (AaronHz), Friday, 26 November 2004 10:48 (twenty-one years ago)

Oh ffs, dropping excessive 'long words' into your interview is exactly what posh kids get taught to do at their posh schools. Stand out and talk about the poem without kissing academic arse. Why do you think they've asked you to interview?

The very best of luck, incidentally. Oxford is fun but keep that chip off your shoulder.

― Liz :x (Liz :x), Friday, 26 November 2004 10:49 (twenty-one years ago)

fwiw, i don't think the interview is supposed to count for much, as opposed to the work you've sent them and whatever your school said about you. bear in mind they want people who will do well in the tutorial system, so being sparky and interesting and interested is better than being drily academic.

x-post - enjoying the chip on your shoulder is one of the most fun things about oxford!

― pete b. (pete b.), Friday, 26 November 2004 10:53 (twenty-one years ago)

Be sure to mention that you like Merzbow

What if I get too nervous and pronounce it wrong?

I'm not even sure I want to go. It'd mean having to commute like a bastard to do band things, and leaving all my luvverly friends (I'm a mature student, so it's not like I'm going to University to have a social life).

Maybe I should just walk in and go 'Ths poem is TEH SUCK, j00 FuX0rs' and walk out again?

― emil.y (emil.y), Friday, 26 November 2004 10:54 (twenty-one years ago)

By George, I think she's got it!

― Why Does Herr Dadaismus Run Amok? (Dada), Friday, 26 November 2004 10:54 (twenty-one years ago)

I actually went to St. John's college. 1979.

(Well, I helped install a planned maintenance system)

They used to have an old Burroughs machine that ran their 'software' on. Wires, levers etc. I think they were in the process of donating it to a museum.

― mark grout (mark grout), Friday, 26 November 2004 10:55 (twenty-one years ago)

an old Burroughs machine?

http://bizarre-movie-reviewer.8m.com/nakedlunch.jpg

― He's allergic to lettuce (Mark C), Friday, 26 November 2004 11:14 (twenty-one years ago)

Be sure to mention that you hate council estates.

― Dom Passantino (Dom Passantino), Friday, 26 November 2004 11:18 (twenty-one years ago)

I do English at Wadham right now! I imagine you'll walk it if you're all mature-like, 'cos it's kinda easy to forget just how uncritically aware one is at like seventeen. If I can help in any way just e-mail me though, I can still sorta remember mine...

(Also like congrats dude!)

― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Friday, 26 November 2004 11:22 (twenty-one years ago)

Get drunk and fight a professor. They'll love your northern charm!

― Ally C (Ally C), Friday, 26 November 2004 11:22 (twenty-one years ago)

xpost: The machine probably contributed to his trust fund when they bought it.

― mark grout (mark grout), Friday, 26 November 2004 11:26 (twenty-one years ago)

A lot of it's just down to how well you get on/click with your interviewer(s). I went for my interview (at Lady Margaret Hall) the morning after Lennon got shot and the first question the interviewer asked me was: "Lennon or Keats?" and I instinctively shot back "Where does that leave Cole Porter?" and we spent the next hour yapping happily about the art of popular songwriting between the wars and zero about literature. They let me in. Best of luck!

― Marcello Carlin, Friday, 26 November 2004 11:40 (twenty-one years ago)

There was a guy at my school who bunked off almost the /entire/ senior year, truanting like 4 days a week to do parlour magic for cash at Covent Garden. He got crazy, professional-class good. Come interview-day: headmaster's report of bemused contempt, interviewer an amateur magician. Two B offer.

― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Friday, 26 November 2004 11:45 (twenty-one years ago)

yey! start singing 'the blob' at them, that's sure to win them over!

― DJ Salinger (joni), Friday, 26 November 2004 12:59 (twenty-one years ago)

I think interviewers must generally be impressed by magic. I gave a job to the young scottish magician of the year last year (I did not ask him to perform at the interview, he just had it on his CV - I suppose it could have been a complete lie).

(good luck!)

― Madchen (Madchen), Friday, 26 November 2004 13:06 (twenty-one years ago)

Thanks everyone. Mr Emily is getting into magic at the moment, so maybe I should borrow a couple of tricks off him? There's a good one where I could grab my sheet of poetry/prose, STAB IT WITH A PEN, but no, look, it's alright really, ta-da! Then I could start hitting them repeatedly whilst singing "beware of the blob" BAM! "It leaps and creeps across the floor" POW! etc. This sounds by far and away the best tactic.

And Marcello, the problem is that I get so nervous in interview situations that I would probably completely forget who both Lennon and Keats were, stare at the floor and mumble something unintelligible.

My biggest fear is poetry, actually. The worst grades I got at A Level were for Wordsworth, and I just can't remember much about the actual technique of critiquing it. This is possibly just nerves erasing my brain, though, I did okay on WWI poems and part of the reason I chose St. John's was because Larkin went there, so it's not as if I never read any poetry ever.

Still, eep!

― emil.y (emil.y), Friday, 26 November 2004 14:41 (twenty-one years ago)

wordsworth is crap. if you get him, just talk about clare

― anthony, Friday, 26 November 2004 18:06 (twenty-one years ago)

Philip Larkin is from Coventry. Have you been there, emily? It's a good place to go if you like places Larkin has been, because it has his poem "I Remember, I Remember" on a plaque on a pillar at the railway station, and it's funny because it's all saying how rubbish his time in Coventry was.

Good luck with the interview.

― Cathy (Cathy), Friday, 26 November 2004 18:21 (twenty-one years ago)

eh? isnt larkin from hull? or did he just live there?

― ambrose (ambrose), Friday, 26 November 2004 18:33 (twenty-one years ago)

Born: 1922, Coventry.

Moved to Hull, 1955.

― Ally C (Ally C), Friday, 26 November 2004 18:58 (twenty-one years ago)

He was there for all the good stuff, then.

― Puddin'Head Miller (PJ Miller), Friday, 26 November 2004 19:01 (twenty-one years ago)

I haven't been to Coventry - although I did go to see The Magnetic Fields at Warwick Arts Centre recently - it doesn't sound that great, to be honest (I mean, a pilgrimage to a place that even he hated? Naaah).

Larkin was a librarian at Hull University for years. My History/Latin teacher met him when he studied there. I was pretty surprised when I found out that he was a St John's alumni, too, but it's there on the webpage.

― emil.y (emil.y), Friday, 26 November 2004 19:01 (twenty-one years ago)

It's the best reason to go, certainly.

― Ally C (Ally C), Friday, 26 November 2004 19:07 (twenty-one years ago)

Coventry is grim, but I am fond of it. It's no Rugby. The famous poet from Rugby is Rupert Brooke, maybe you should go there instead. Oh, you did say you liked WWI poems. You should go to Rugby definitely, in that case.

― Cathy (Cathy), Friday, 26 November 2004 19:24 (twenty-one years ago)

Emily, St John's is Oxford's richest college and for every Larkin there's a Blair or vice-versa - which is exactly why you should go there. You're intelligent, but so is everyone in the queue. What you have to be is interested, and that in itself will make you interesting. Many less mature/more posh people would probably go in the door big-head first and alienate their interviewer through hubris, but you have to remember behind every single tutor's door is an eccentric who is a world expert in what he or she likes, who can run things their way in that room. Basically, they're fun people, and if you respect that scenario and warm to curmudgeons you'll be okay. Good luck - if you get in, the perks are lovely, study grants and the like available for allsorts. They even had little scholarship grants endowed in the mists of time; a friend studying at KEH got one for £200 and it was considered very prestigious. Armed with that foreknowledge I think you can find enough to be interested in when you arrive there. Talk about papers you've written about things other than poetry in English, esp if speaking about a contemporary, if you can connect them untenuously. Ask them if they like their job and why. Good luck! Let us know the result.

If I'd gone to Oxford I would probably have chosen Wadham because it's nicely lefty and a few guys I know who went there are terrific writers who are doing VERY well, who are not-posh. The college I did go to sends very hot, smart and neurotic girls and boys to Wadham for JYA and they actually integrate them into the College well.

NOTE: yes of course there will be loads of rich assholes whose parents finessed it for them through a combination of school and phone calls, but in reality 90 per cent of the people who are there have earned it, regardless of background. Just concentrate on your work and the nice, interesting people from all over the world will repersent soon enough.

― suzy (suzy), Friday, 26 November 2004 21:13 (twenty-one years ago)

I went to Brasenose, but did most of my favorite English classes at Merton. Interview advice: Eyecontact is good. Grant every point they make at first, even if you disagree with it,. along the lines of "I can see why you'd say that, but I sense that . . ." When you get up to leave, shake their hand if it is offered to you- at my Marshall interview I was at the door, turned my head, and looked back at a room full of interviewers on the committee with arms outstretched. Horrifying! (but I still got it). Don't freak out, and don't think that you need to answer or resolve everything that comes up. Don't lie about having read things you haven't; bring the conversation round to something relevant that you have read.

Good luck.

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Saturday, 27 November 2004 01:13 (twenty-one years ago)

Drew when were you at Brasenose? Was it during the era of Keely F1sher, she of the massive tomes on Victorian fetishes?

Interview: you are not there to impress them with high-flown academic language. That is what they intend to teach you. You are there to convince them that you're worth being taught. I can't remember any more specific tips but maybe the key is not to think that you are out of your depth - say what you are good at saying, be confident about it. Otherwise it's too easy to come across as actually being out of your depth.

I dunno how I got past the interview, I really don't. I am still shit at that sort of thing and back then was even worse.

― The Lex (The Lex), Saturday, 27 November 2004 01:22 (twenty-one years ago)

I did the last two years of the BA in English (didn't sit mods, did sit finals); this was 1993 and 1994, I think (my life pre-grad school gets fuzzy sometimes). I had Bernard R1chards, didn't have Keely F1sher, but it was all about R1chard McCabe at Merton, who I studied Renaissance literature with. I recall a medievalist who specialized in poems about rape- does that ring a bell?

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Sunday, 28 November 2004 00:44 (twenty-one years ago)

Wish I could think of something useful, but am neither doing English nor at J0hn's. It felt like, at interview, the most important thing was not to be afraid of the interviewers - but since you are, you know, mature and all that, it doesn't apply as much.

(I feel like I've been continually letting down my tutor since the impression he got of me at interview. gah.)

― cis (cis), Sunday, 28 November 2004 14:11 (twenty-one years ago)

haha Drew you're probably the same age as La Fisher (who I don't think is at Brasenose any more, actually the last I heard of her she was writing pseudo-academic journalistic articles on the use of 'urban English' and patois in Dizzee Rascal and Sean Paul's music). I didn't do English myself but I encountered her many times, and my best friend was tutored by her and used to regale me with many stories. They all used to take the piss out of R1chard Mcabe because of the way he pronounced certain words.

― The Lex (The Lex), Sunday, 28 November 2004 14:33 (twenty-one years ago)

xpost

Cis, I feel like I've been letting down my tutor since my interview too. For the last 2 years I lived off the marks I got for my Prelims (half of which covered work I did at 6th form), and then they saw my results for Part I of my Finals. Whoops.

― jellybean (jellybean), Sunday, 28 November 2004 15:51 (twenty-one years ago)

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