HOW I GOT INTO OXFORD UNIVERSITY | My Experience and Top Tips!

[Music] hello everybody welcome back to my channel so I'm sorry that I said like this my voice has pretty much gone it came back and then I went out again on results day and it's gone again so I'm sorry that my voice is about 10 decibels lower or whatever is that it usually is but I hope that you can still enjoy the video regardless first off I just wanted to say this is the first video that I filmed since results today and I just wanted to say a huge huge huge huge thank you for all of your love and support on my results a video and on my Instagram on my Twitter and literally all of my social medias honestly it's meant so much to me and I really did work hard for those grades and to see you guys appreciate that and not like I thought I'd get loads of hate comments about it but I didn't that's all which I thought was really really sweet so thank you so much and rest assured that I will be doing lots of university videos in the coming weeks so give this video a huge thumbs up if you'd like to some university videos from me so today's video it's definitely on the university theme and it's about how I managed to get into Oxford so this video is like one of my most requested videos ever but I didn't want to film it until I definitely got the place but I have lots of tips and tricks that I'm gonna whiz through today that hopefully will help you in some way so I'm going to go through it step-by-step because obviously there's different elements to applying to Oxbridge for those of you don't know walks bridges Oaks Oxbridge is like Oxford and Cambridge together so they're the two universities and you can only apply to one of them and they're like the top two universities in the UK so pre-application what I would recommend is going to as many open days as you can so Oxford and Cambridge have two three open days a year I would definitely recommend going down and going down early in the morning and leaving as late as you can to see as much of you know the city and of the colleges that you can and I would also definitely recommend summer schools and access days so access days are subject-specific grades and such subject specific days for people who are interested in I know languages or medicine or whatever it is that you can go to Cambridge Oxford and you can watch some lectures and students and things these are very much worth looking at if you type in sort of like Cambridge student like year 12 Cambridge days and stuff like that they'll come up I know that Trinity College at Cambridge do quite a few and Oxford do Lots as well so there was a Modern Languages day in March last year for example at Cambridge and Oxford so definitely recommend looking at those two because if you can't make the open day that's still a really good way to look around the Uni but also definitely recommend uniques from a school unique some school is at Oxford it's a free summer school you have to apply in sort of January of year 12 I think it was but I would definitely recommend that I have a whole video on my channel about unique if you have any questions about unique definitely ask me in the comments but I absolutely loved that summer school and that was the reason I ended up choosing Oxford over Cambridge and was the reason why I ended up choosing German over English so for sure I would definitely recommend having a look into that when it comes to choosing between Oxford and Cambridge that has to be a really personal decision for me personally I picked Oxford number one because it is in a very convenient location it's an hour and a half from my house and an hour and a half to London and obviously Birmingham and London are the two places that I need to be most so it was way way easier to get to than Cambridge I preferred the course the grades were lower I preferred the city the vibe the people just everything about it I preferred so it wasn't really a difficult decision for me but if you're really really struggling then definitely pick it based on the course because you're going to be doing that for three four or five years of your life so if it comes down to the wire then look at the course and think which one would I prefer when it comes to picking a college obviously Oxford and Cambridge are colleges which is sort of separate little entities within the university and you pick a college found whichever College you end up at that is like your home so for me I actually was going to prefer to Brasenose Brasenose was where I was thinking of applying because I would never would have thought I never ventured out of the center to look at the other colleges and when I went on unique they put me at Lady Margaret Hall and I just fell in love with the place I am literally obsessed with it and I actually liked that it was further out that's what I wanted so for me that was what how I ended up picking my college was because I stayed there on unique but I think it depends on the person some people accidentally go into the college to go to the toilet and end up loving it other people just pick a random one so don't worry about it too much because they're all similar but definitely try and see as many colleges as you can open day and get the alternative practices from the colleges because that gives you a real insight into what the college is actually like and not how Oxford or Cambridge just trying to sell you the college so when it comes to personal statements I've already done a video on that so I'm not going to talk about in this video and I will link that video down below but all I'm gonna say is that Oxford personal statements and do you need to be very academic so make sure that it's like 80 90 % academics 10% extracurricular the next thing is written work so it depends on your subject obviously with Sciences this isn't really as common but I know for my subjects I had to send in a letter a letter an essay in English an essay in German and an essay in Spanish so this is obviously the one that freaks everybody out because you're like what do I send so I tried to send a variety so they could see how I worked in different conditions so for English literature I send a non timed sort of just class essay that was my best one from year 12 and it was the one that I was most comfortable talking about in an interview setting and for German I sent off my ASSA so I got my ass as his back anyway so I sent off my timed exam condition AQA ASSA and for Spanish I sent a timed essay but it was a timed class essay so I tried to send one from three different conditions don't worry too much about what you send but just make sure that you're comfortable talking about it because it could come up and interview it didn't for me but it does in a lot of people's interviews so make sure that you're really careful and make sure that if they were to ask you questions about it you would understand also keep a copy of it because you'll probably need to read it through before you go to interview the next thing is admissions tests so again this is subject specific so I can't give advice on specific tests but my number one advice for this would be is to start preparing in the summer just doing little bits you don't have to sit in revise for it like crazy but start familiarizing yourself with it because when you go back in September and the Oxbridge deadline is in October there's going to be so much going on with your a levels that you might not have as much time as you'd have liked so I did quite a bit of revision for the Modern Languages test over the summer which really really helped me my next tip would be passed papers so obviously with the new tests there aren't as many but generally I would jet I would Jeff my voice is literally it's on fire like it actually hurts to speak I would genuinely sit just doing as many pass papers as you can and getting your teachers to mark them I did absolutely loads and it really did help me to get a feel for how the exam worked and yeah I would just say don't freak yourself out because it's not the end of the world it's not the determining factor worst comes to worst if you do badly on your tests and they still want you enough they might just ask you to come to Oxford the week before freshers to take do a grammar thing or anything so like don't worry about it too much but make sure you revise enough for it that you get like a solid score also worth looking on YouTube and stuff and looking at tutors and examiner's comments on what they like in the tests and what they don't because obviously they're very different to a level so you need to make sure that you're appealing to the Oxford tutors rather than AQA examiners predicted grades obviously you don't really have much control over this it depends on how hard you've worked but don't be afraid to try and bargain with your teachers if you really think that it could help you just to say right now you don't need perfect GSS secrets and you definitely don't need perfect IAS grades to get into Oxford I know girls at my school that got quite a few like B's at GCSE maybe a couple of B's AAS you know that still got in you don't need straight a stars I got straight a stars and I got in but that's not a direct correlation there were lots of people that get straight a stars that don't get in and there are lots of people that get lower grades that do so don't think that your grades are not good enough Oxford like it's such a small part they look at the whole application holistically so every element that I'm talking about right now we'll all be looked at together not separately so if you perform less well in one area you can do you can out like way that by performing better in another area so for example I don't think my Spanish Modern Languages test was very good but I think my interview went quite well so that kind of must have bounced itself out and they were looking at my application teacher reference is basically what your teachers write on your you Cassville so you can't technically see this and it will go off when you send your yuccas off with your grades on your personal statement everything you'll teach you over a reference now my number one tip for this that a lot of people don't really think of is to use your reference from your teachers to add in extra stuff that you couldn't quite fit in your personal statement so for me I had a few films and a few books and a couple of summer schools that I've been on in my personal statement so I spoke to my Yukos advisor unto my subject teachers because in my school what happens is you're you cuss advisor writes the intro and the outro and then your subject teachers write a paragraph about each subject so I asked my teachers to put in certain things which meant that like everything that I couldn't fit my personal statement also went in my reference which was very very useful a lot of people don't think about doing that but it could be really helpful if you are running short on character in your personal statement and the final step obviously is interview so do you have a few tips and tricks and stuff that I learn from my experience that will help you so what happens at Oxford is that you go for your interview and you already have a couple of interviews that they'll tell you when they are and stuff on the day that you get there I had two so I had one for German and one for Spanish it depends on the subjects that you're doing as to how many interviews you'll have at your first-choice college so once I've got there I have two interviews that Lady Margaret Hall and once I'd had those interviews it was a case of waiting around to look at the board to see if I'd been pulled so what happens is sometimes is that you'll get sent to another college to do an interview there and do not read into this at all so I did not get pulled I did not get to a sent to another college and I thought that I hadn't got in but actually that must have meant that LMH really liked me and didn't want to send me to another college to see if they wanted me as well so don't read into it because some people got pulled to four or five colleges and didn't get in some people got pulled to three or four colleges and ended up at their first choice college like it's so hard to tell and I wouldn't try and reading about all if you do get sent to another college it can be for a number of reasons one of the girls that was like running the interview told me this come on talk stop talking please it can either be because the main college like isn't sure if they've got enough room for you and wanted to see if you are solve like say if you're at the bottom of the like acceptance list in your college like they want to give you a place that you're just below their quota they'll send you to another college to see if you rank well within their students it's to make sure that say if loads of really amazing students apply to one college and the pool is less strong another college that the amazing students are the ones that get in like I dunno what I mean oh I've just knocked a bowl off a little but you get what I mean like it's to make sure that everybody's got off I shot and it doesn't matter which college you apply to it could be that they just want to use you as a leveler so they want to see what the standards like at another college so they're only interviewing you to make sure that they're giving their candidates a fair treatment or it could be because your college loves you and wants to show you off to other colleges like it literally depends and all of the tutors meet up and swap candidates around and everything so don't read into that too much and if you have to do another interview just give it your best shot so my interview experience was a very traumatic as you if you've seen the video on my channel you'll have seen but I've had to cut a lot of it out because I didn't want to talk too much about the interviews before I got a place I didn't want to like like I don't know if you're allowed to do that so I had my first interview at Worcester College for German and honestly it was the worst interview apart from my driving test it was like the worst forty minutes of my life so I was told that I didn't have any pre-reading I got there early I forgot to the college Valley thank goodness I did because it turns out I did have pre-reading so make sure you get to the interview early just in case you do have pre-reading that they haven't told you about most the time they'll tell you if you've got pre-reading but they didn't tell me so I got there and they gave me this poem in German I had no clue what it was about I didn't know half the words the title was in French and I was just like what is going on I was so stressed out and I was just like oh my god I don't know what this is about I was trying to annotate it and write what I thought then I going to the interview and he was like read it out and I was like oh great so I kept stumbling and muttering so I was terrified and he was like are there any words that you don't know so me being trying to be clever don't try and be clever people just be yourself was like oh well if I tell him every word that I don't know I'm gonna look a bit stupid so I went for like the words that I needed for the poem to make sense so I asked about five or six words when I probably didn't know about 20 of them and then he asked me to translate the poem and I was like I've just asked him all the words that I don't know and I'd still don't know half the words so I translated the poem very badly and he questioned me and grilled me and all of this stuff he was like what article is that referring to what verb like conjugation is that referring to loads of grammar questions that was fine I could actually do that but then it just got messy so he just started asking me questions and I know he was trying to push me now but like at the time I was like what is going on please I don't know what's going on and he was asking me so many questions and really really pushing me to think about the poem honestly I really caught him and what it was about now and I was giving the stupidest answers like literally stupid or what I thought sounded stupid because I was trying to explain my thought process like everyone tells you to do and one question led to another and then he asked me is poetry death and I was just like how do I answer that question and honestly it got to the point with that question where I was about to cry because he'd been asking me more and more probing questions and I just felt so stupid like I didn't know what I was talking about and I just said to him look I can't like can you really compare literature like a type of literature with a state of being like that's all I said to him so I was like I don't think poetry is death because poetry is a problem literature and death is a form of life such non life I said a load of crap basically and he was like all right okay well we'll leave that section there I thought well I'm got in there lying because he Cleveland thinks I'm thick and I was just like oh my god and then he asked me no the woman sat that also asked me a few questions in German so I had heard that everybody else got our stuff like where did you go on holiday last year or have you ever been to Germany and I got asked something about Kleist in Kafka because they hadn't asked me anything on my personal statement in my actual interview so I was there like having read all these books and ready to talk about Christ Kafka etc etc and all I got asked on with this bloody poem and then she starts asking me in German in German questions about how we can learn from sup like learn from authors to understand human race better in society and I was like like she was like why do we read books I was like I don't know and I have to answer these questions in German and I was just like oh my god I haven't got in because I made so many stupid mistakes the word for human behavior I accidentally said human retainment I was stumbling stuttering all over the place but I go in so after that horrible interview which led me to solve my eyes out for hours afterwards they must have loved me enough to give me a place like that interview was the worst thing ever I felt so stupid but now I realized that he was just trying to push me my Spanish interview was much nicer and you know maybe might that interview wasn't as strong because I didn't feel as pushed in that interview and it was a lot more simple and it was based on my personal statement but my second interview are apps that you loved it was such a good interview I really enjoyed the discussion I love the tutor like I loved everything about it everyone's interview experience is different that was mine other people had two amazing interviews other people have like six horrible interviews it's so personal to you but just don't read into it because honestly I thought as soon as I came up my German interview I thought even if I was the next Spanish prodigy I would not be getting in and I cried all the way home as well because I thought I hadn't got in and I did so you just can't judge it watch like loads of YouTube videos about people's experiences with interviews because it's nice to see how everyone else finds them but don't read into it too much because you will have your own experience my number one tips are once say what you're thinking don't sit there in silence even if you feel like you are chatting pure idiocy that makes no sense you know what I mean doesn't matter because actually they just want to know what's in your head and in my German interview I literally felt like I had about to you were in cells and you know maybe I did answer something decently like who knows but make sure you're saying what you're feeling don't sit there in silence because they're trying to figure out how you think because you might have perfect grades the perfect personal statement but they want people that they can teach so you need to show that you're teachable don't worry if they make you cry try not to cry in the interview is my number one tip save the tears when you come out don't worry if they push you to the point where you don't know the answer that's probably a good thing because it means that they've pushed you to the point where you don't know and they want to see how you they want to see like how you behave at the point where you don't know what's going on essentially you know what I mean don't have a fixed mindset and don't be that person that comes into your interview with an idea about a poem or a book or a molecular structure and won't change your idea if they challenge you stick to your point but if you can see that they're right then change your point and comment it from their angle because they want to see that you're flexible and that you have an open mind so don't go in there with a set idea about what you're going to say make sure you're responding to what there's saying to you rather than regurgitating pre learn stuff and my number one tip is to make friends have fun you're in Oxford for four or five days at Christmas like it's beautiful or you're at Cambridge and it's just such a good experience my four days interview apart from the first day once I after my interviews like I didn't talk to anyone before my interviews and after my interviews my mom was like go downstairs for the love of God and make some friends I still talk to them today all of my friends that I made into you got in and we're all going to Lady Margaret Hall or other colleges in October and I still talk to them and we're planning like to meet up and everything like that and I had such a lovely time exploring Oxford and everything so make sure you make the most of the experience because it's not very often that you get free food free accommodation for like four or five days in a beautiful city like Oxford or Cambridge so make the most of it and even if your interviews go horribly just push it to the back of your mind go to the common room play games make friends go to the Christmas markets and enjoy it because it will be a really good experience regardless of whether or not you care so I hope this video is useful I'm sorry if I sound like I'm shouting it's literally I have to shout my voice to get across because right now I feel like someone has set bias and we throw so I hope that this video was of some use to you guys if it was then be sure to hit the thumbs up button if you have any other videos you would like to make me to make about the Oxford experience definitely hit me up if you want me to make like maybe a Q&A with some other Oxford students when I get there I can do that but yeah let me know and I will try and make that for you so thank you so much for watching and I will see you very very soon with a new video bye guys

Channel: Eve Bennett

Views: 230,850

Keywords: 4-08-2018, how, to, get, into, oxford, university, oxbridge, UCAS, tips, tricks, advice, eve, bennett, alevel, a-level, results, hacks, personal statement, college, grades

Id: R5LdRF0aBI8

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 22 2018