Comments on the university interview: what to do, what not to do

Derrida and A-Level students
Tom Wells finds a glancing connection between Derrida, his death and university interviews(Reprinted from new perspective, Vol 11, No 3, March 2006)

Postmodernist exemplar, Jacques Derrida, Director of Studies at the Ecole des hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, is now dead: he died in October 2004. The connection referred to can be seen to be so indirect and tenuous that Jacques might heave a little chuckle in his grave.

Derrida, a prolific author whose seminal study, Of Grammatology, was published in English in 1967, is the thinker most associated with postmodernism that occupied many intellectuals in the late 60s and 70s. Postmodernist thinkers drew attention to, in simplistic and reductionist terms, the relativism of a literary text. The meaning of a passage of writing was not a fixed entity, a discrete object, and implicit assumptions and contradictions it embodied could be ‘unpicked’ by careful study. Further, a passage represented the personal and social context of the writer. Described by some as brilliant but by others as a poseur, an obscurantist charlatan, Derrida did not help to win over his detractors because of his verbose and ambiguous prose and his tendency to ask questions rather than give answers. Despite these comments, few will deny that Derrida had a huge impact over the last 30 years on philosophic thought, especially in the humanities.

He can be taken to represent the type of university teacher with whom a candidate for university admission  would find contact and communication most difficult. Students’ teachers and UCAS advisers may have a store of anecdotes on bizarre university-admission interviews from yesteryear. This writer recalls the story of an alleged interview during which not one question was asked and the single interviewer and candidate sat in silence for ten minutes. Another story recounts that a candidate was asked if a telephone directory is a History book.

Over the last decade, or so, peculiar or unprofessional interviews have ceased and academic game playing is excluded. Even Oxford and Cambridge interviewers are given training on how to gain the best from candidates. The interview for university admission will be their first interview experience for many students. Well-prepared candidates are given advice on how to present themselves. The following readily remembered points are the guidelines offered by a school UCAS officer, Philip Young.

Do:

1.    Be on time and dress smartly but not necessarily in a suit.

2.    Inform yourself in advance about your chosen course from the Internet  or the university prospectus.

3.    Have a clear idea of what you wish to achieve from university and your course, thereby you will present yourself as a more worthy candidate during interview.

4.    Listen to questions with care and answer directly to the questioner.

5.    During the interview, make eye contact with the interviewers but don’t be confrontational.

6.    Ask your own, intelligent, questions but don’t invent some for the sake of it.

Don’t:

1.    Don’t forget the date! Don’t be late. If unavoidably delayed, phone and carry  the number for this purpose.

2.    Don’t slouch, fidget or talk too much.

3.    Don’t forget what you put on your UCAS form: interviewers may ask you about that.

4.    Don’t lie or invent things; you will be found out.

5.    Don’t rubbish your school or college, your parents or your circumstances; it will gain you no credit.