 |
| Punts, Ivory Towers, Privilege - or something else? |
Given the fact that something... anything...(!) had actually managed to interrupt the wall-to-wall Olympics commentary on Twitter, I thought it was probably worth throwing out my own experiences of having been an undergraduate in Cambridge. There certainly seems to be an enduring interest in what lies behind the images of punting and ivory towers.
Getting into Cambridge
My dad had been in an orphanage and left school with no qualifications at 15. He was in the army for 23 years, before setting up a little one man business repairing washing machines. My Mutti was brought up on a widow's pension in post-war Germany and her job when I was a kid was working on a supermarket checkout till. I went to Cowplain Comprehensive (now Cowplain Community School) in suburban Hampshire. I'm not sure what sociological background that exactly puts me in: probably lower middle class - who cares, frankly. I had not been to Winchester or Eton, let's put it that way.
My school didn't have a sixth form. Our chemistry teacher had to teach 3 distinct groups together in one class: those doing O level (5 of us), those doing CSE (different syllabus, about 15 or so), and those who were non-exam people (about 10 who left school at Easter after their 16th birthday, with no qualifications). This can't have been too easy. The school wasn't posh, but equally kids weren't being stabbed outside the gates, to be fair. No one in the history of the school (about 60 years) had gone to Cambridge.
 |
| Cowplain! Affectionately also known as "Cowpat" |
My sixth form college did send a handful of people to Oxbridge each year, but it wasn't something which was in any way pushed. I remember a careers fair where there was a "law stand". I was interested in becoming a lawyer: the only advice available was on becoming a legal executive, which is a worthy enough profession, but there just wasn't any advice at all available on even becoming a high street solicitor. Bear in mind this was at a quite respectable state sixth form college in Hampshire, not some deprived inner-city school in Merseyside. We weren't exactly being pushed on the path of becoming a High Court Judge or an MP. Oxbridge was distant and applying there really was not something commonplace.
I therefore didn't dream of applying to Cambridge: it just really wasn't on the radar. After I had received my A-level results, I started freaking out about going to Lancaster University. I'd paid my room deposit and was a week away from going. I told my kindly History teacher that none of it felt right: the place, the course, the timing. She said "You need to take a year off. Why not take time to think about things and apply to Cambridge instead? " An hour later I'd cancelled my place and had soon reapplied to 5 new universities, this time including Cambridge. Talk about an upstart: no one in my family had even been to any university before.
I won't bore you with the full gruesome details of the interviews (5 of them in total) but suffice to say I think they were quite scatter-gun and I'm still not really sure what they were looking for. At this time you ranked your choices of college: I put King's first (it looked REAL pretty), followed by Trinity (big courtyard, looked like it was from a movie) and Pembroke (nice gardens, nice old buildings). Kids from posh schools were by contrast coached in interview technique, which college to apply for for a particular subject, and most definitely would never put Trinity or Pembroke 2nd or 3rd choice behind King's. Those colleges would never interview you if you hadn't put them first choice.
 |
| It was all his fault. Bloody frog. |
King's did in the end reject me: I screwed up by admitting a bit too honestly to one interviewer that I didn't really like French literature. I wasn't EVEN applying for French, so why was he asking me this? When pushed, I said that I'd read Candide. Actually I'd half seen the Channel 4 TV operetta version one boring evening, on my little portable TV in my bedroom of our bungalow in Cowplain, probably whilst stuffing my face with bags of crisps. Yup, you've guessed it: my interviewer, Professor Paddy O'Donovan, MA, PhD (Cantab), happened to be a bit of a World Expert on Voltaire. Oh, fuck.
That interview went from bad to disastrous. I came out pretty shaken. Fortunately, however, I did well enough in the other two King's interviews that I was "pooled" and had a second chance when Girton College interviewed me. I was in Israel on the rest of my year off, picking grapefruits on a Kibbutz, when a letter arrived from Mutti telling me they'd called the day after my departure to offer me a place.
Life at Cambridge
It is genuinely very hard to compare what it was like studying at Oxbridge, unless you have also actually studied somewhere else as well. Here is what it was not:
- Somewhere full of rich kids wandering round wearing ties attending cocktail parties
- Somewhere you went punting every afternoon whilst drinking champagne and eating strawberries
- Somewhere other students' opening line is to ask what your parents did for a living and judge you on it, or make you feel uncomfortable for answering "Dad repairs washing machines"
- Somewhere you had to attend chapel, do sports, go rowing, attend dinner wearing a gown every night, or basically do anything you might base your knowledge on from having watched the movie Maurice
- Somewhere where other kids would turn up with new BMW cabrios (or indeed any car: they were pretty much banned for undergrads)
 |
| Honestly. We didn't go round in ties and blazers like the BBC pair |
My overwhelming memory of Cambridge is, in fact, hard, stressful, academic work. The terms are short: just 8 weeks. You do not do work outside the terms, so everything is sandwiched in to a very pressurised time frame. You go from being the "big fish in the little pond" (probably the brightest kid at your school) to a very sudden and possibly hard realisation, that you are now a little fish in a very big pond. It comes as quite a shock to realise there are a lot of people a lot more intelligent than you, and quite a few people have to be in the bottom half of the academic results in a place like this.
Any thoughts of jolly hockey sticks, punting on the Cam, and getting drunk every night vaporised within the first week into the near nervous breakdown territory of essay demands. In Cambridge you are generally taught 2 or 3 students together with one "supervisor' for an hour. You have perhaps 3 of these supervisions a week and have to do a good 15 hours preparation for each one. You can't skive or pretend you've done the work: you have the people who the House of Lords take guidance from on tricky issues of Constitutional or Trust Law pulling your essay to pieces in front of you.
 |
| No time *even* to buy fashionable clothes :o |
My friends at "other universities" did the things I imagine many students do: go out, get drunk, vomit through their nostrils, join lots of societies... Mainly, all I did at Cambridge was work my backside off just to tread water. How the guys featured in the BBC programme have time to be filmed for a documentary, let alone devote themselves to climbing the greasy political pole is beyond my range of personal experience.
When I made it to law school to do my post-grad LPC course, it struck me that it was the Oxbridge people who treated it a bit like a delayed adolescence experience. There were many comments that the work load was laughable compared to what we had been through for our undergrad degrees. We therefore fully used the opportunity to inflict maximum pain on our livers. Many other non-Oxbridge people spoke as if the work were difficult and there was a lot of it to do. That's as close a personal comparison as I can make between the workloads in Oxbridge and non-Oxbridge universities.
Chips on Shoulders and Smugness
The thing I think that people don't get about Oxbridge is people did not go wandering round thinking they were special because they were there. Yes, there was undeniably a big element of "social status" about having been accepted when it came to university applications, if your other school friends were going somewhere non-Oxbridge. However, the moment you actually get there all the friends you make are also in the same situation. No one is interested, for the very simple reason they are also Cambridge students. They're frankly more likely to be crapping their pants about the next essay they have to hand in. You genuinely lose any sense of being "special" very rapidly indeed.
It is the same with the physical atmosphere. The first time you go for a supervision up a little winding staircase in one of these magical courtyards, you can't quite believe it. It is definitely not Cowplain school, and unless you are used to this type of architecture because you went to say Eton, you are bowled over and possibly intimidated by it all. This disappears rapidly. Every supervision is in some fabulous old room in some fabulous courtyard and it's only when you leave and return years late that the sheer magnificence of the architecture strikes you again.
 |
| Recent visit. King's: the bastards who rejected me! |
The few "chips on shoulders" I have noticed have definitely been from the outside. Even they haven't exactly been marked, and tend only to be from people who applied, but were rejected. My law firm, Clifford Chance, allegedly only used to recruit trainees from Oxbridge. They stopped doing so when they realised there were far better candidates from other universities and this policy was damaging the quality of their future lawyers. The Oxbridge admissions system undoubtedly does reject some really good quality people, many don't bother applying there for any number of reasons, and some who get in really aren't that bright at all. My boss at CC was a Manchester graduate. He was easily as sharp intellectually as anyone else at the firm. I'm not sure I actually ever knew where the vast majority of my other colleagues went to. Again, we were far too busy trying to meet billing targets to care.
Is it Worth Applying?
Again it's hard to say without having studied anywhere else and being able to make a direct personal comparison. I am glad I went to Girton and was really quite happy there, after a somewhat bumpy start. I made some decent friends and I received good teaching. However, despite the academic reputation of many of the supervisors, none of the actual teaching was qualitatively better, to be quite honest, to my A-Level teachers back at sixth form. Nonetheless, as a whole the personalised attention does seem to be quite different to the big lecture hall style of teaching elsewhere.
Perhaps the best aspect of the "Cambridge experience" is the small, friendly nature of the colleges. Mine is the 3rd largest, with 160 undergrads in my year. You get to know each other really quite well, and it was for the most part a supportive atmosphere. I did do a bit of rowing one summer for a laugh, which was great. I am very grateful for the financial help I received, even from my not particularly wealthy college. I was housed in college for all 4 years at a hugely subsidised rent, and received various grants - they even paid for my flight to Mexico to help me with my Spanish (I went backpacking round Central America: the trip of a lifetime). I went to "Formal Hall" about 3 times a term, a chance to wear your gown and go down the bar with your friends afterwards.
 |
| Graduating PME! Back row, blond mop, third from left |
You also undeniably have, for life, a perception from other people of having been somewhere outstanding - even if the sometimes mundane reality of studying there might not measure up to this. People generally do tend to judge you positively because you are an Oxbridge graduate. It looks impressive on your CV and whilst there are equally sharp competitors for jobs from other universities, I'd be disingenuous to suggest I think that there aren't situations where it gives you an automatic advantage.
I feel a lot of affection for the place, each time I go back. I don't feel smug, but I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to have gone there. I can't imagine any other institution, from all my tours of universities during the application process, where I would have felt more at home than at Girton.
Closing Comments
The one thing I do want to make really clear with this blog is that being at Oxbridge is a very different experience to the one popularly portrayed. Documentaries such as "Young, Bright and on the Right" might make entertaining TV, but they do not reflect the reality.
It is the same with the never ending supply of idiotic articles in the likes of the Mail. I've just read one referring to "Caeserean Sunday" captioned "Passing out, peeling off and drinking port out of condoms". Really, Daily Fail? I've never heard of this "famous" supposed great Cambridge tradition that everyone takes part in and brings "shame" to the ancient institution.
 |
| The inaccurate popular image of Cambridge c/o the Daily Fail |
Oxbridge colleges genuinely do strive to make their doors open to the bright, not to the posh. I really believe the selection procedure does not discriminate against you if you went to a state school or come from an "ordinary" background. The interviewers know you haven't been coached and they will make allowances. They are not biased to the privileged: they are biased towards intellectual potential. Whether the selection procedure works in finding this is a different question. Both universities put huge efforts into encouraging candidates from state schools: I have no doubt of this, and know it has been going on for decades now.
The fault in uneven success rates from independent and state schools, in my view, lies much more with the schools themselves and with inbuilt societal factors that encourages the privileged to aim "high", and others to not even consider it. I'm afraid that stereotypes of toffs in ties talking about their debating society really doesn't help with all this: perhaps the BBC could take note?
 |
| This tweet just puts it beautifully. Justifiably RTd so many times |
No comments:
Post a Comment