I got in! Well, provided that I meet the offer. AAAABB at Higher Level, and one of the A’s has to be in English. Erp. I would have needed around that to do English at Trinity anyway, but my “sure, I’ll do Arts at UCD if it all goes pear-shaped” mentality has abandoned me. It’s comforting knowing exactly what I need to get, but after all this excruciating effort (“excruciating” here being the teenaged hyperbole for “mildly bothersome”) it’d be silly to miss it because of something like the Leaving. Not even disappointing, mind, just silly.
Let’s backtrack. I didn’t say anything about the ELAT because I wasn’t expecting to get an interview, and then I didn’t say anything about interviews because I wasn’t expecting to get a place, so my careful precautions (taken very much in vain, I’m sure) against being perceived as an egotistical twat by the good people of the internet have left a proper chunder-load of stuff yet to be blogged about. And what do we do with a chunder-load, children?
So, ELAT. It’s an exam you do in November if you’re trying for English at Oxford. Still no idea how that went – presumably, well enough, but it’s basically an unseen comparative where they give you six passages and tell you to compare and contrast two or three of them “in ways you find interesting”, so there’s plenty of scope to produce something truly boss, but commensurate scope to convince them that your brain is operated by a quartet of goblins pulling little levers and one of the goblins got sick on the day. I picked a piece of prose and a poem and wrote about how they dealt with the role of language in both enriching and complicating life, or some similar tripe. They use this to decide whom to call for interview.
And then, egads, there was a lot of post-delaying snow, and also an invitation to interview. I mention them in conjunction because the former meant that I only found out about the latter at the last minute, which was good, I suppose, in that I didn’t have the opportunity to do my usual obsessive-compulsive, “How can this entire affair go bollocks-up? Let me count the ways”, generally counter-productive worrying thing. It also meant that I didn’t have time to prepare. Some of the people I met (of which more anon) had had mock interviews and stuff, but I’ve yet to learn if any of them got in, so I don’t know if they were at an advantage.
I was staying at Keble College for the five days – think polychromatic brickwork and a longass dining hall. Oh, and four-ish steep flights of stairs up to my room, but let that pass. (Kudos for spotting the Elizabethan drama reference! And a deduction of kudos to me for pointing out said reference, I suppose.) One standout feature was how little time I spent actually being interviewed, but this was fine, since there were twenty-something other people applying for English who also seemed to be spending a lot of time not being interviewed. English banter ensued. There were one or two Sebastian Flyte types, but no-one was hostile or competitive or any of that other stuff you’d expect. Well, no-one I talked to. It was probably self-selecting in that the hostile, competitive ones might’ve just stayed in their rooms most of the time, but I’m choosing to believe that everyone at Oxford is lovely.
And so we arrive at the interviews themselves. They confirmed one thing for me, anyway: I really, really do want to do English. Analysing an unseen poem in front of world experts? Happy fun times. Comparing medieval and Victorian literature? Make mine a double. Coming up with idiotic theories and watching them nod their heads in a way that could mean, “By jove, she’s right,” “Let’s throw her from the battlements, though this may prove difficult given that this particular block was built c. 1970 AD” or anything in between? Sign me up. I said many, many stupid things – highlights include forgetting what a pronoun was and referring to the poet as ‘he’ and then throwing in a hearty ‘OR SHE’ about a million times with one of the unseen poems – but I had fun.
I had three in all: two at Keble, and an extra one at Christ Church which I found out about later, scheduled about three hours before my flight home. I didn’t really get to see much of the college in my flustered, must-get-to-interview state, but I hear their dining hall appeared in the Harry Potter films. My head wasn’t as much in the game for this one because I was worried about getting home and fairly sure I hadn’t gotten in, but my offer came from them.
It’s not over, though. I have to make the grades. That’s the worst of it: not being able to celebrate properly. I’d find it easiest to get the A’s in English, Spanish, French and Art, so I’ll probably concentrate my effort on them, but they’re all notoriously enamoured of going wrong on the day. Also, I don’t want to get too tactical about it. The temptation is to go back to basics, devote equal time to everything and see what happens. It’s amusing, though, that I could theoretically fail Irish and Maths and still get into Oxford.
Anyway, this has been overlong and self-congratulatory, but what else is new? I’m going to go and buy food, and then I will study, because that’s what people who are Oxbridge material do. Ooh, Oxbridge material. It’d make a good bumper sticker and all.