Applying for OXFORD LAW!!

hi I'm Maggie I'm going to be going into my third year studying law at Jesus College Oxford this is one of two videos in this video I'm going to be going through the law application process I go through the steps in the application process and what the admission tutors are looking for the other video I've made is about kind of law Oxford in general what in my life doing Law Office Oxford is like basically I'm going to start with a preliminary point if you're watching this because you want to become a lawyer have a career in law or you're actually a lot more interested in something else academically so say you want to become a lawyer what you really love English just do the English degree it's a very common Pathway to do a non-law degree and then do something called the law conversion course you will do your normal degree and then do a condensed version of the law degree and you end up being qualified so you can then become either a semester or Barrister basically doing a non-law degree does not make it any harder for you to become a solicitor or Barrister what's a lot more important is one kind of enjoying your time at University and also getting a good grade in your first degree and if you're not interested in law it's going to be a lot harder to do that than in the subject you are actually interested in so I'm going to start talking about the application process the you probably know the basics these steps in the application process the things you need are first good grades this is GCSE great and a level grades or equivalent you need a personal statement at least for this year which shows why you're interested in studying law you need a good and that multiple choice score and Essay and you also need to in your interview you need to be showing the tutors why they should give you a place so starting with your grades GCSE grades it's obviously going to strengthen your application having stronger GCSE grades however Oxford contextualized GCSE grades so if you for example went to a lower performing High School you're from an area where there's lower progress to higher education or you have other kind of personal extenuating circumstances for example urine care this means that your GCSE grades will be contextualized so Oxford will take this into account and then because your grades have been contextualized this mitigates maybe slightly lower the GCSE grades so if you don't have all Minds don't stress as long as you've got kind of grades where you can show that you are academically able that's fine don't let not having straight eights and lines stop you applying with a levels Oxford asked for Three A's for law at the moment which is actually lower than quite a lot of other universities a lot of universities now started asking for an a star in two ways so that's quite nice because it does take the pressure off getting that a star if you have three A's great I wouldn't say you need any more than this you definitely don't need 4A levels it's not going to make your application stronger they ask for Three A's because that's what they think you need to be able to cope with the law degree and they see enough of you as a person through the other aspects of the application process but they don't feel like they need really high entrance grades to differentiate between candidates now the personal statement for this year so people applying this September October you do still need a personal statement as I'm sure you know you need to show this this sounds like a really obvious point but your personal statement needs to show why you're interested in studying your you are doing a law degree which is very different from lawn as a profession so you don't want to be talking about oh and I want to become a sister and I've done all this work experience great if you can show that your work experience gave you an interest in a certain area of law that you would like to study but you need to make sure that you're keeping it focused on academics the easiest way of doing this is through what the admissions people call supercurriculars Super curriculars can be things like books you've read academic Summer Schools such as unique um things like podcasts online courses um moocso massive open online courses are quite useful things like that another thing I will say is the material you use doesn't have to be super academic so you don't need to be reading full-on University textbooks because you're not going to get anything from them I remember when I was writing my personal statement I was really like okay so Oxford does jurisprudence so I'm gonna read a drawstring this textbook I read about four pages and then just gave up and signed up I don't understand any of this and to be honest there's still a lot of draw experience I don't understand after having studied it so definitely don't think that you need to read something really academic to impress the tutors the books I put on my personal statement were you first framed and the secret bastard which are very very obvious examples of books you put on a low personal statement I think every single person who wants to do it or has read at least one of those two books and that's fine I got a place you should stick with the books you can buy in waterstones because they are going to give you an in an insight and an interest in law in a way that you will understand and you will be able to talk about because the most important thing both kind of in your personal statement and if you get asked about it in interview is you can talk about what it is from this resource from this super curriculum that interested you and made you want to do law so one quite nice thing as well you can do on your personal statement is talk about a case what I did is I went on to the Supreme Court website looked at the most recent judgments and clicked on the one that used up the least characters which ended up being soccer and soccer which is a defamation case um about Facebook post basically if you can kind of read a case um tell the tutors through your personal statement what you found interesting or what you picked out of that case it's really good because that's what you're doing for your law degree your lnat if you didn't already know takes two parts the first part is the multiple choice section you have I think it's something like 85 minutes to do 42 questions the multiple choice section you it's basically like really hard comprehension so you get given passages to read about they're normally like an article extracts or about something really random you've never like I remember all of the practice questions being about scientology what you do is you have to read this passage and then you get normally about four questions for each where where based on statements and you have to pick the one that is true down that is really hard so full context out of 42 the national average for everyone who takes it is normally about 20 21. but Oxford offer holder average is kind of anywhere between 28 and 30 but if you don't get 30 that's obviously not the end of the world um everything in your application is considered and also for contacts I got a 26 in mind which although is higher than average was still lower than the average for offer holders in my year you get people with a very wide range of our multiple choice schools who get offers you also have to do an essay this is the second part of your lnap so you get given a choice normally of three essays I think and then you get 40 minutes to write one of the best things you can do to prepare for this section of the Elma is just like by doing timed practice essays getting other people to read them because this does two things one is it just helps you kind of think about the sort of controversial issues you're going to be asked essays online this is because the point of an alma essay is you are kind of giving an argument to a controversial issue the practice essay questions are structured similarly obviously um the other thing that it does is it means you can be confident going into your L map that you will be able to do the essay in time when you do timed essays you know how long it will take you to write 500 600 words so for me it was about 20 25 minutes and then I knew that I could spend at least 15 minutes planning which was really useful and also just quite calming going into it knowing like okay I don't have to worry about being able to finish it I do have to worry about is my arguments but I have time to think about that when you are preparing for your Alma the best resource is on the lnat website itself there's an online simulator where you can do basically a simulated Emma which is really useful because they are done online they're done in driving test Theory centers which especially if you if all you're used to is doing exams and tests on paper it can be nice to do the simulator so you kind of know not only what format but what doing a test on a computer feels like because it is different I think the Elna is definitely a really important part of your application I say that it's probably most important when it comes to shortlisting for interviews obviously I'm not an admissions tutor I am just someone studying it all talking about my own experiences um but I personally think that it's more important when it comes to shortlisting you for interviews I would say once it comes to interviews that then kind of becomes the most important thing so moving on to the interview for law you tend to get two interviews at one college so I did two interviews at Jesus both about 20 minutes long both I had pre-reading for now when I did my interviews online which is the format they are going to be in now before the near future at least and so how pre-reading works as you are emailed a passage well I was emailed a Roman scenario and then an extract from a case as pre-reading and you get about 20 minutes half an hour to read that and then the interview basically takes the form of you discussing kind of those passages the good thing as well about having pre-reading is it's stop one in those 20 30 minutes before the interview you have to stop panicking because you've got something to do and also you just feel a lot less overwhelmed because you kind of know what you're going to talk about in the interview by the time you've done the reading it's not like you're going to be like what could they possibly ask because for law you don't need any legal knowledge at all most people won't have any some people will do not a level and then have a little bit but most people don't have any legal knowledge so you can be sat there like I I don't know what they're gonna ask me I don't know anything about law they know you don't know anything about law um so the way my interview started was I got asked one question on my personal statement and then we just talked through the pre-reading and this was the same for both interviews there's not that much you can do to prepare for a law interview because you're not expected to have any prior knowledge it can be quite nice to like read the news make sure you know what's going on in the world but you don't really need to do anything specific one thing I will say about mock interviews in general whether they are realistic to the Oxford interview or not they are good to practice at getting you to speak to someone about something you don't know they're good at putting you in kind of a simulated situation of pressure like you will be in that interview so you'll be able to cope with it a lot more if you are looking for Laura interview video if there is one on the Jesus YouTube channel the point about interviews I said at the start of the video you want to try and show yourself to the tutors as someone they want to give a place to you want to stand out as someone willing to learn someone they want to teach someone who has potential in that subject basically and the way you do that is by showing how you think that's what they're looking for they're not looking for your knowledge of law they're looking for how your mind works basically they want to see if you can follow logic if you can form arguments see where the strengths and weaknesses are in there and your arguments this is the steps of the application process I hope you found this useful and if you do decide to apply for Oxford law absolutely best of luck

Channel: Jesus College Oxford

Views: 3,655

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Id: Ztk7I28gxpo

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023