The English universities Cambridge and Oxford, as well as the Ivy League US universities, of which Harvard is topmost, are famous for their fantastic level of selectivity.
What are the criteria for being offered a place to study in these schools?
Academic excellence?
Extra-curricular brilliance?
Social influence?
Being the child of an alumnus?
A YouTube film adapted from the 2004 film Der Untergang, Downfall, with Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler, shows Hitler raging in his Berlin bunker, shouting that, even though he controls most of Europe, having occupied all of Eastern Europe and France in Western Europe, even with those sterling credentials he still could not get into Harvard or any Ivy League school.
What university did he get into?
The non-Ivy League school he chose as a safe option in case the coveted price of an Ivy League offer did not come through.
The film satirizes the now legendary mystery of how to get an offer to study in the world's most selective academic institutions in a world where the schools are inundated with stellar applicants to the equivalent of 100 applications for 10 spaces, that being the statistic from one of my inquiries at Cambridge.
My investigation began at Cambridge Regional College in Cambridge, which provides A Level programmes and programmes centred in particular disciplines, such as Engineering , among others.
"What are the criteria for entry to an engineering programme at your institution,particularly for a foreign student?," I asked Patricia Curl, the admissions officer.
The student must have very good science grades to begin with and must demonstrate a clear grasp of what the course is about, their reasons for wanting to do it and their career progression beyond the course.
They must demonstrate strong motivation to devote themselves to the academic challenges the course involves, she summed up.
These qualities demonstrating the credibility of the student will be assessed at an interview which will be set up if the student's academic performance in their previous education indicates the application should go forward, she clarified.
If one wanted to study for an undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge after doing an A Level programme here, could you advise how one could go about it, I asked her.
The University of Cambridge is a different ball game, she stated.
The university admissions would know best how to answer our question.
The candidate must first be very good academically, if not there is no point applying.
A candidate can be very good academically though, and not get a place.
In addition to academic excellence as demonstrated by stellar grades, the university seems to be looking for a particular mind set, a total orientation of self expressing a particular academic culture, was her summation on that subject as I remember it.
With this rich guideline, I proceeded to the University of Cambridge, where I learnt that each college, the self governing social systems housed in buildings dedicated to them and in terms of which the school is organized within the framework of the central university administration, each run their own admissions system, requiring that one needs to make admissions inquiries from these colleges. individually, even though they all operate within the general guidelines of university admissions policy.
Interestingly, having spoken to admissions office staff or admissions tutors at most of the colleges, they all reiterated the image of academic culture presented by Patricia Curl at Cambridge Regional College, amplifying the points she made.
First, the student's grades at the English A Levels or its equivalent must but be at least A* meaning above 80 or 90% in two courses and no less than an A in a third course.
Applying with anything less is a waste of application resources, as stated by Phillipa in the admissions office of St. John's College.
Beyond this baseline of excellent grades, what more do the colleges look for, leading to many with excellent grades being turned down, I asked various admissions officers and tutors.
The responses were unequivocal and unanimous.
We seek a person immersed in the subject, who can't help thinking about the subject, who is constantly working at it, affirmed Dr. Martin Thompson at Peterhouse, who has a PhD and perhaps an undergraduate degree from Cambridge.
The student needs to go beyond wanting to do the course in the name of getting a job, he summed up.
The candidate needs to be constantly updating themselves on the course, reading the most current academic journals, keeping informed on the latest developments in the field, described Kate Flint, admissions officer at Downing College.
An applicant for an undergraduate degree in engineering for example, needs to demonstrate the inspiration and imagination to apply their knowledge of mathematics and physics to real world problems, and demonstrate evidence of this, stated the admissions officer at Kings College, directing me to sections of the College website on engineering that guide the prospective engineering student on such expansion of their studies in school.
All these qualities beyond the unvarying platform represented by excellent grades are assessed through the candidate's personal statement and their responses to questions in a face to face interview, stated Kate Flint at Downing.
The candidate needs to be comfortable in their own skin in discussing the subject they want to study and its informing disciplines, be confident enough to respond creatively to interview questions that go beyond the immediate scope of their knowledge, working out implications of questions, applying them to issues that might not be obvious in the questions presented, in sum be able to carry out an informed conversation from the basis of what they know, enabling them deal intelligently with what they might not know, sums up Philip Oliver, admissions tutor at St. Catherine's College, along with describing to me the fantastic achievements of old students in engineering at the college, discussing them with the pride of a father and the probing but pastoral assessment of a school headmaster in the classic mold of that time honoured tradition.
The student must be teachable in he spirit of the dialogical tradition of the Cambridge tutorial, Kate Flint asserts, Martin Thompson describing that dialogical culture as involving conversation in which one thinks through situations taking one beyond the fact of knowing to applying what one knows to new situations, a context necessitated by the intense weekly tutorial regimen in the colleges which complement the teaching provided by the university, as described by Philip Oliver.
What do I think of what might look like stratospheric demands for a candidate aspiring to enter a school as an undergraduate, a teenager in their mid or late teenage years?
I think these goals are great, although they raise questions about differing ages of maturation of different skills in people and the challenge of developing all these skills in the same person.
I see these criteria as a priceless vision to pursue at all stages in one's life, being an ideal of learning that goes beyond a degree program at any level.
First published on Facebook on May 19, 2015.
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