What EXTRACURRICULARS you NEED for OXFORD!

hi everyone my name is Dr Matt Williams I'm a teacher in politics and what's known as the access fellow here at Jesus college at the University of Oxford now what and how many extracurriculars do you need to get into Oxford well this is going to be a really short video potentially because the answer is none you do not need extracurriculars unlike ivy league universities like Harvard and Yale where having a string of impressive extra curriculas may be essential for the University of Oxford you do not need any extracurriculars but you do need what are called super curriculas now I'll explain the differences between them and I'll explain exactly what sorts of supracurricular experiences you need the headline is that supercurricular experiences are not directly likely to get you into the University of Oxford but they have an enormous indirect impact and if you want to find out why you're going to have to carry on watching all right so let's dive into it got some slides I'm gonna have to wear my tinted glasses because I'm I'm half blind all right so just bear with me on that um so super and extracurriculars I mean a crucial starting point is what I'm even talking about here you know what are the differences between super curriculas extracurriculars and all of that sort of stuff there's quite a lot of vocab going on here and it's important to be clear what I'm talking about and what exactly you may need in order to be really competitive applicant at a university like Oxford so first of all extracurriculars well extracurriculars include things like Hobbies Sports drama music leadership positions jobs or work experiences or any care response abilities that you may have so these are things that you are doing outside of your curriculum your curriculum being your school curriculum and you these are things you're doing that are non-academic not related at all to your academic interests beyond your curriculum extracurricular and as mentioned for some competitive universities outside the UK these things are helpful even within the UK some universities do look to admit a well-rounded student who has a number of different experiences beyond their academic work but for Oxford and Cambridge universities we're not looking for all-rounders we're looking for actually quite narrowly focused highly skilled individuals and that's where super curriculars become much more relevant so super curricular is something that is academically relevant such as reading books and articles listening to podcasts watching lectures on YouTube and experiencing various things that might be relevant such as attending a court case in the public Gallery if you want to study law okay extracurricular activities can be super curricular so there's a bit of a Venn diagram where what could be considered to be extracurricular such as playing a musical instrument might obviously have some academic relevance if you are planning to study music similarly if you take part in a lot of sport then you can perhaps help us understand the relevance of that to your academic interests if you're planning to study something like medicine or biomedical Sciences or biochemistry where playing sport could introduce you to a whole host of entirely relevant academic puzzles but generally speaking things like Sport and being good at sport will help you know in no way get into Oxford we do not have sporting scholarships and we do not have any sort of Advantage given to anyone who's good at sports which thank God because I would have been in trouble otherwise because I'm not good at sport okay and so what specifically do you need well there's no particular sort of list you know if there was a specific list of super curricular activities that we were looking for we would publish it we're not that evil I mean we would just tell you this is the list go and do it and do it to the best of your ability so that's why a lot of people get slightly anxious because it does seem a bit nebulous a bit vague what is it that these universities want from me and it's Troublesome and I completely sympathize with that so what you need concretely is proof of your academic potential and what that means is that we want to get a sense that you are ready to be an undergraduate so supracurricular activities are those things that take you beyond your school curriculum hence super curricular and they are basically you pretending to be an undergraduate student you're doing the sort of stuff that undergraduate students do and that makes you credible it means you've got evidence that you're ready to start your studies a lot of people will come to applying for University places and we'll say things like I'm very passionate about mathematics I'm really interested in medical Sciences what they don't have is any proof of that they can't concretely say and because of my Fascination in mathematics and because of my interest in medicine I've read this I've done that I've looked at the other right that's what you need you need some concrete proof and you do don't need a lot of it by the way in fact quality is very much more important than quantity and I'll get into that a little bit later but you need some proof and so what we're aiming for with supercurricular activities is to basically pretend like you're an undergraduate for a few days in the run-up to applying for University because then you've got some evidence you can point to to say you're ready okay now to make this even more concrete I'll show you the decision algorithm that we use so you know what criteria do we use When selecting between competitive candidates so what I've got here is the admissions criteria for PPE which is philosophy politics and economics at the University of Oxford that's the degree that I'm most familiar with for these admissions criteria are very similar to other degrees and indeed with a quick search online you can find the admissions criteria for any degree that you're interested in and as you can see there is we're looking for application and interest we're looking for reasoning ability and we're looking for communication skills okay and these three core elements will be gauged through a range of data we'll look at school results we'll look at your personal statement we'll look at your teacher reference on your ucas application form we will use admissions tests for many but not all of our degree programs we will use interviews and in all of those forms of data we're looking for evidence to fulfill these criteria okay now supercurricular activities will help you in all of these aspects okay so they won't directly help you get into Oxford we're not looking for you to fulfill a checklist we're not looking for you to have read certain books or to have listened to certain podcasts or to have watched certain lectures online but if you do those things you will enrich every aspect of your application it will enhance your application and interest in the subject it will make you more interested right pursuing things that you care about beyond the curriculum will make you more interested and it'll mean you'll have more stuff to talk about if you need illustrations of what you're interested in in an interview for example okay it will also improve your reasoning ability because supracurricular activities will often expose you to the reasoning abilities of other thinkers and the best way to engage in supercurricular activities is to think about them for yourself reflect on them so don't just passively read a book for example but read it and think about it and think what do I think about this what's my view on this and tell us tell us in your personal statement what your view is or what you've read don't just tell us you've read stuff tell us what you thought about it okay so it will improve your reasoning ability it will also improve your communication ability if in the process of these supracurricular activities you get used to thinking out loud and sharing your thoughts with those around you could be friends and family doesn't need to be subject experts at all but just getting used to explaining in simple terms what your views are on the things you've experienced is what we're looking for okay so getting back to the slides um let's move on to the next point which is how should you start well the key thing with supercurriculars is just to start now I know that might be a bit of a annoying thing to say given you're not necessarily sure what you need to do but there's an important phenomenon known as the zygonic effect which you'll be completely familiar with which is that thinking about some big task or project is very much worse than actually doing it and once you start doing the task you'll feel compelled to finish it so procrastination is just the big problem but the way to fix it is just to start just dive in just do something anything even if it's just five minutes even if after this video you spend five minutes starting on your supracurricular journey great there's a great Japanese proverb which I love which is relevant to this which is which means that the thinking of something is harder than the doing so just do it just just um start today okay and you also need to sort of work out your timing so work backwards there's another great um law which I love which is called Parkinson's law which is that the amount of time the tasks will take is equal to the amount of time allotted to the task it's actually a bit of a joke it's basically saying that we will all work to the deadline and so you need to know what your deadlines are so applying to Oxford has a hard deadline in mid-october and so you need to work backwards from that to work out how much time you've got and come up with a a an accurate and reasonable plan of what you can do in the time you've got how can you pretend to be an undergraduate student in the time you have available to you and one of the best ways of actually concretely going about doing this is to develop smart goals smart plans so those are something things that are specific measurable attainable relevant and time-bound pardon me excuse me so I can give you some examples so these are potential examples for supracurricular experiences that are smart for someone who is interested in studying law at Oxford or someone who is interested in studying medicine at Oxford so for law you could learn about a court case right so that will take you beyond your school curriculum Because unless you're studying law at school which is not common then learning about court cases will be something new okay so you could in pursuit of that watch some legal cases on YouTube you could attend your local Court which is which is possible in many countries or you could read about about a past case and court rulings are often published online especially from the higher courts so that's something that is specific and measurable is it attainable yes because you can use local and freely available resources is it relevant yes because fundamentally this is what law undergraduates do law undergraduates day in and day out will read lowercases they will read about law reports and they will think about them so if you start doing that you are pretending to be a law undergraduate and you are doing the absolutely perfect sorts of supracurricular activities is it time-bound set yourself a limit say I'm going to do three hours within one week something reasonable and split that up into sort of 30-minute chunks every day don't do it all in one go because that can be very tiring and it can be disruptive of your other commitments in life so little and often is very much the key so let's say you're thinking of applying to study medicine well you might want to do something specific like read up about sadness now what about you isn't that I'll explain a bit later how you can choose things to look into but I'm really intrigued by why human beings evolved to be sad you know what thinking about darwinian Theory what was the comparative advantage for some long-distant ancestor of ours in surviving by being sad occasionally I just find that really fascinating so that's the sort of question that I might look into so that's something quite specific and I could then measurably look into it by finding a book or a research article and again it's completely attainable it's totally relevant and it's totally bad okay so these are examples of the sorts of things by which you can pretend to be an undergraduate student and therefore have plenty of proof when the time comes and in meeting all of those admissions criteria that I showed earlier now what should you look into I might often ask what should I read and I'll give you some examples of resources that we recommend but fundamentally we're looking for independent Learners people who have the get up and go who care about stuff and are passionate about stuff on their own so why not try and pose a question you'd like to answer not a question that someone else has told you you ought to be interested in but one that you are authentically interested in yourself that's relevant to your subject and I've called this the toddler technique because it's the sort of thing that young children do all the time right they ask great questions like why is this guy blue so I've come up with a few sort of questions that my inner toddler has come up with okay just to give you a few examples so I've already mentioned why did sadness evolve which I think might be quite interesting for someone applying to something like medicine and why doesn't the sea get saltier so for someone thinking of applying for Geology or Earth Sciences or geography that's a question I I don't know the answer to I'd really like to know you know I know roughly how the sea gets salty in the first place but I don't know why it doesn't just keep getting saltier and saltier until all the fish and all the animals die so I'd be happy to look into that uh why is Hamlet better than Corey Elena so if you're thinking of like a little English literature how do quantum computers work and why does zero factorial equal one so these are all questions that my sort of inner toddler has come up with and you've got loads as well I'm sure so just allow that in a toddler to go on a bit of a rampage and put them in the sandbox start exploring things you know make your life relatively easy to start with by looking at accessible resources like Wikipedia like YouTube like Tick Tock perhaps although be careful with the reliability of that sorts there's Oxbow which is excellent which is if you go to oxploy.org it's the home of big questions it's a university of Oxford resource which is really helpful and of course rely on the resources all around you you know your teachers your friends your relatives and yourself of course but start sort of exploring some ideas and come up with some questions you'd like to answer because that will really focus and it will help your smart goals be really specific because specific is good if you have sort of General interests that's not really going to give you much helpful evidence if you have quite specific interests that tends to be a better supercurricular okay now you should also develop passion and you should develop passion for a relatively simple reason which is because people who are passionate do everything better they they commit their relatively scarce resources of time and patience and energy far more efficiently than people who are not passionate okay so be passionate right how are you supposed to know what you're passionate about that's a really interesting question I mean the the trick is you've got to chase the dopamine so that little sort of thrill that you occasionally get um from all sorts of phenomena like you know uh getting a like on a social media post to um a bus coming around the corner once you've been waiting for it for for two hours or whatever um or or you know in more sort of serious and potentially dangerous contexts you get a dopamine hit when you win in gambling and of course you can synthetically produce dopamine High is with stuff like cocaine don't do that but nonetheless you can also just get this sort of this thrill and it's really interesting because dopamine um is to do with sort of um managing our scarce resources and and committing us to long-term sort of commitment to certain difficult goals so in other words things like you know our Neolithic ancestors would have been hunting and in order to make sure that they didn't just quit hunting they would get a dopamine hit once they had finally succeeded in their hunt and they would get that sort of relief and that sort of thrill and that's what you're looking for sometimes you may have noticed that when you find out a fact about the world or you read a particular book it gives you that sort of really contented sense of I've found something I understand the world a bit better that's most likely dopamine and you've just gotta dive down that rabbit hole once you feel that thrill Chase it because it will make you so much more powerful it will mean that you you develop much more interesting and much deeper richer understanding of particular problems and you will be so much more of a credible undergraduate because that's what undergraduates do they have to determine their own curriculum okay so this is why we want people to do super curricular activities because the curriculum to a very significant incident University will be up to you okay now uh what do you do if you don't know what you're passionate about or if you're passionate about loads of stuff or be scientific just test some hypotheses let's say you've got a lot of interests spend a day I mean not a whole day but you know a half an hour or an hour of a day pretending to be an undergraduate student of a particular subject or a particular topic that you think you're interested in go and explore that sandbox go and read some stuff that you think you might be interested in and if at the end of testing that hypothesis you determine actually do you know what that wasn't as fun as I thought it might be then test another hypothesis okay maybe I'm interested in a different subject or a different angle okay so just be rigorous don't be seized and Paralyzed by the fear of I don't know what I want I don't know what I'm interested in do something remember there's a garnic effect just do and don't overthink it okay and what should you think about with regards to Quality well don't go for um just loads and loads of stuff we're not looking for a long list of things you've read or stuff you've watched or whatever um Quality is so much more important we also want some self-reflection so when you talk about these things in your personal statement tell us what you took away from them tell us what you thought okay don't just give us a long shopping list of books you've read give us some self-reflection but in terms of how you are supposed to know whether or not it's good enough there are a couple of sort of basic tricks I mean first of all we provide examples of suggested subject resources so if you just search online for suggested subject resources Oxford you'll find this page and it's got It's got a huge list for every subject that we offer and loads and loads of great resources there so that's that's a good place to start another thing to think about is if it's something that's been produced by a university such as Oxford University press then you know it's the right level you know it's the sort of things that undergraduates read basically whilst you want to start looking into subjects in a fairly easy and accessible way you want to climb the mountain fairly quickly and do stuff that undergraduates do and what undergraduates don't do is just read popular works that everyone's reading but that's what we often see on personal statements we often see people say I've read this popular book about medicine for example but I haven't read anything that is kind of relevant to an undergraduate medical degree and that's going to make us a little bit worried that you are not actually ready to be a medical student so you want to try and ramp up the difficulty a little bit you can also use academic papers that are typically published by universities so here's an example from the Imperial College this paper is probably one of the most impactful papers of my lifetime because it's what led to lockdown during covid-19 it came from Imperial College London it's got a fairly innocuous title report now an impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce covid-19 mortality and Healthcare demand published by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team but it's what led to lockdown and specifically this chart that projected death rates if there was no lockdown and no social social distancing is what sharpened the government's mind in March 2020. the point being if you read resources that are at the the level of a university then you are acting as an undergraduate and it's that pretending to be an undergraduate that's going to make you much more credible in your super curriculas so conclusions what extracurriculars do you need to get into Oxford none you may need extracurriculars to get into other British universities so don't quit them and do talk about them in your personal statement the general rule of thumb is about 80 20 80 of your personal statements should be about supercurriculars 20 on extracurriculars in terms of what supercurriculars you need you need to pretend like you're on an Oxford undergraduate or an undergraduate at any University and go and read the sort of stuff that they would read go and look about look into the stuff that they were looking to and for goodness sake think about it okay I'm going to have a follow-up video in a couple weeks going into more depth about how you can reflect on what you've looked into and how you can start to make the most of those super curricular experiences but I think that will do for today let me know in the comments if you've got any questions and I'll see you next time thanks for watching bye

Channel: Jesus College Oxford

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Length: 20min 49sec (1249 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023