[Music]

Hello, I'm Dan Hall and I'm the Access and Outreach Officer for the School of Geography and the Environment here at the University of Oxford. In the following recording we will be exploring the interview process for Geography at Oxford with two of our admitting tutors, Professor Richard Washington and Dr Sam Hampton. Richard and Sam, would you like to introduce yourselves? I'm Richard, I've interviewed with Sam several times in the past year in college. I'm a climate scientist by trade and I teach physical geography in college as well as lecturing in the department. Did I say, Sam and I have done interviews before, where we have, several years on the go, and so we are a familiar double act in in many ways and we tend to follow the same sort of path. But I'll let Sam introduce himself first and then we'll get back to those details. Hi, I'm Sam Hampton, I'm a researcher in the Environmental Change Institute. I specialise in energy and climate governance and policy primarily, and I was actually an undergrad here at Oxford a long time ago so I'm now sitting on the other side of the table, as it were.

Right, shall we say a little bit about how the interviews work next. When Sam and I have done interviews before they've taken a very familiar format of a reading that the candidates get to go over, typically half an hour before the interview starts. The reading is chosen so that it doesn't, as far as we know, intersect directly with the syllabus in A level or IB, or other kinds of education certificates in the world, so we hope that it, sort of, it's not something you can easily have prepped for. We want to try and create a level playing field so that it's as fair as possible across all candidates. And then what we test for in the readings by a series of questions is understanding of the big picture in the article, the understanding of the argument if there is one, where the details in the article fit into the argument or the big claim that the article is making. And then we finish that by generalising if possible about the article. Now the reason that we start with that is that we think it emulates quite closely the kind of thing that candidates are expected to do in the course of their time with us, namely reading lots of stuff, reading it quite quickly and getting the big picture while retaining the details. What we're looking for in addition to the answers to a bunch of specific questions is a dialogue with the candidates as well. So in that sense it's not dissimilar from the sort of tutorial experience you might have when you get here. Once the reading is done, then we hand over to the other interviewer who takes certain questions and in today's version that'll be Sam who presents something else not to do with the reading. So the first part of the interview Richard will take a lead on and I'll just be scribbling down some notes, listening carefully, and then he'll hand over to me and I'm going to, um, I usually use a visual prompt of some kind, whether it's a map or a chart or any infographics or something like that. And the idea with that is to get candidates really thinking on their feet which is something that we we really encourage at Oxford. And so I'll be asking the candidate to just kind of explain what they're seeing, start just by talking me through the the prompt and then we'll see where that conversation goes. And then often if there's time towards the end of the interview we will have read everyone's personal statement, so if there's something that jumps out from that or something that they've done at school or outside of school, we might ask a question relating to that, just again trying to get them to think about something that they're familiar with, something they've put on their personal statement but that they can relate and think kind of academically and intellectually about, and and have a conversation that, as Richard says, might be quite similar to the kinds of conversations we have in tutorials.

Hello Hetty, thanks very much for joining us for the interview, I'm Richard Washington, tutor in physical geography at Keble College and I'm joined by... I'm Sam Hampton, I'm a researcher in the Environmental Change Institute which is part of the Geography department, and I'm also one of the tutors at Keble College.

Good, Hetty I think we'll start with the article that you've been reading, I'm sure it's on your mind and you'll be keen to discuss it. Any particular questions about the interview though before we start? No.

Good, OK, I'm going to ask you please to summarise the the article, take a few minutes to do that and pay attention to bringing out the big picture in the article, the main claims of the article.

So the article is basically discussing what are the sort of causes of the repeated weakening and strengthening of the sort of global circulation conveyer belt in the last ice age, so it's looking at the relationships between ice sheets, wind and haline circulation in that last glacial period. So it's talking about, my pronunciation is going to be awful, but Dansgaard Oeschger... D-O, we'll say D-O events, um, Heinrich events and Bond cycles, sort of talking about the evidence behind those, so ice cores and then the Macheil ice sheet model that was created as well. And so sort of the main thing it seems to be uncertain about is it talks about the Bond cycles and the Heinrich events but they explain changes in ocean and air temperatures but only every seven thousand to twelve thousand years, and they happen every one to two, so there's still something missing there and it suggests that that might be some issue with the hydrological cycle, because less is known about that.

OK, thanks, I'm going to ask you a bunch of specific questions now and if it's necessary feel free to go over things that you've already said in the summary. So the article is drawing attention to possible mechanisms of climate change in the past, it's not current. What kind of evidence does the article draw on to to make the claims that it does?

So first it talks about sediment cause and layers of detrital carbonate which I assume is sort of like carbonates from weathering or something, anyway it talks about those ice cores from Greenland showing the period eight thousand to forty thousand years ago as a key bit of evidence.

So there's a useful element for the evidence that tells us the kind of things that we think have happened in the past. The article then gets on to trying to explain why those things happen and draws on different kinds of evidence to do that.

So I'm not sure if you call it evidence of the ice sheet model that from what I understood he kind of built a model which matched up with their hypotheses about the Heinrich purge events. Yeah, good, yeah, so there's evidence from sediment, there's evidence from ice cores, and there's also modeling work going into the mix. In your summary you mentioned that there's this conveyor belt in the ocean which I think is responsible for the changes that the article is talking about. What is that conveyor belt and how does it work?

So there's generally the sinking of cold and salty water in the Atlantic, which kind of upwells in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and that is kind of like it transports nutrients along that, what's it called, the North Atlantic deep water, and that transports nutrients and also heat around the Earth. OK, it's a large-scale feature as you've described it involving major ocean basins. What sort of things could disturb that conveyor belt and why should disturbing the conveyor belt be important to explaining the story?

So it spoke about it, so it's density driven, so a change in that density which I think it was saying when the water becomes diluted then that's a change to density in terms of salt content, and temperature change or in the right, like heat loss by the water. Exactly, so, and what sort of things in the past might have changed the density of the water to make that conveyor belt behave differently? So the theory is that sort of massive discharge of icebergs into the Atlantic would cause a change to that. Good, OK, we've spoken about evidence, now you've used a new term which is theory.

What made you use that term and and why wouldn't you class that bit of the article as being evidence?

Um, which bit of the article, the ice sheets? Yeah so we're pretty clear about the ice cores themselves and what they tell us, we're pretty clear about what the sediment data is telling us, but then when we came to the explanation you used the term "theory" - theory of what might disturb that hard scale conveyer belt of ocean circulation? Well, so the evidence is that it's in the ice cores but saying what led to that is not as certain, I mean it's obvious when I was talking about the ice model as well it sort of was using the word speculates about the, sort of, link between the two. So I'd say that's a theory because it's links that you're drawing based on the evidence but it might be disproved in the future. I guess also this was written in 1993 so and I don't know what's happened since. So did you happen to notice what journal it was published in? Nature. Yes, yeah, have you heard of Nature before? Uh, not really, no. OK, one of the key take-home messages of the paper that's a little bit frightening is the fact that you can get these flick flacks in climate which are large amplitudes so 5 to 10 degrees which is in China but of course the article's just talking about the past, in fact at the end of the last Ice Age, do you think that this carries any message for us in modern times or do you think this is just a curiosity of science?

I think it's really important given that, I guess not not so much anymore but especially at the time of writing, there was a lot of speculation about current changes to the climate and a lot of people saying oh, you know, it's natural the earth does this, XYZ, so I think understanding the causal mechanisms behind what caused those fluctuations means that we can say, OK, is this just what's happening now or is there evidence for these same causal mechanisms going on at the moment. If not, what's different and obviously what's different is anthropological aspects. Which is increasing global temperatures and melting ice and putting fresh water into parts of the ocean which may disturb the mechanism that you wrote about. Yeah. Any final questions on the article before I hand over to Sam?

I don't think so, no. OK, thanks Hettie. Great, thank you, so I'm going to just straight away share my screen so just bear with me and maybe you could just let me know when you can see an image. Yeah, OK, so there's lots going on here. I would like you to just take a moment, take as long as you need, just to look at what you think is going on, maybe just describe it and then ultimately have a stab at what you think it's telling you.

So it's about planes, something about planes going on in there. So the supply axis is I guess charting attitudes to flying or patterns of flying, so flying as an aspirational luxury, and then a sort of by-product of hyper-mobility, to what I guess might change to get us to fly less, and then those words on the, sort of, white lines I think are referencing sort of so cultural exchange, restaurants and exploring the world contributes to this aspirational luxury, I would also, sorry I forgot to mention, the x-axis is a timeline, so that's all back in 1950 and so charting chronologically how things might have changed, so around the 1990s, 2000 climate change. So those ones in bold seem to be like the big ticket item things that are on like the cultural agenda, so you go from associating flying with vacations, the good life, time, ability and sort of luxury, and then around that 1990 to, well, where we are now, climate change comes into the picture a bit more and then along with those ideas of cultural exchange, restaurants vacations back in 1950, you've got ideas of carbon offsetting, and so I think then what that's showing is to end at 2020, so those planes look like they're thinking about flying up, and so the suggestion is that, I guess, reframing things so experiences like exploring new values taking on a sense of moral responsibility might be ways in which we can decrease flying and make it, I guess, take it out of popular ideas of what it means to live the good life. OK, thank you, that's a very comprehensive summary. So what kind of graph is this, what do you think the evidence or the data behind it is?

In terms of type of graph, well, like, how have they made it? Is it driven by data or is it simply a drawing?

I guess a bit of both. It's not, you know, it's not like the graph in the article on ice sheets which is, you know, specific points of data, it's not quite like that but I assume it's informed by, I don't know, surveys about what people value and stuff like that. So informed by evidence but not necessarily you know, yeah, not as you say data point by data point. Exactly, so there are pictures of aeroplanes for a start aren't there, so, OK, so let's just take what you said about use of surveys and also what you said about the fact that it goes back to 1950. Now it's quite difficult to survey people now in 1950 so do you think it was surveys or how else might data going back that far have been gathered? Use of archives I guess, I think that would be a pretty key one looking at, as well as just like popular culture at the time and what that was promoting, adverts I guess. Yeah, so looking at, kind of, adverts back from the 1950s and then if you were the researcher trying to make this graph what would you look at adverts and and how might that lead you to generate these lines for example? Um, I mean I guess if 
you're looking at adverts in the 1950s in there, promoting motor cars is like a means to affluence and it's available to everyone type thing, comparing that now to adverts for electric cars which emphasize, you know, do right by you and the rest of the planet, buy our new Mercedes, I think that is quite a good way of understanding not only what advertisers think will appeal to people but also how things might change because I think that the media have a very big role in that. Absolutely, OK, so and as you said EV adverts now are kind of to do with moral responsibility and that's, you can see that's in the bottom right and side of this chart which is as you say about aviation so just final question: what do you think each kind of distinct line might represent?

Each distinct line, so that's talking about the thing in bold, so the good life is exploring the world, being a traveler, time, saving time and then escaping time, so what might you call each? Why have they got kind of four distinct lines and then a fifth one? It seems to, kind of, a few other ones just emerge but the one where we have climate change, that comes out of thin air doesn't it?

As key, I don't know, I don't know what the word is, concerns or sort of topics, and yeah I think that's close enough and I think the authors in this case call them narratives but they're also kind of story lines or themes around different types of discourse, so reasons that you might fly, you know, it's because you might be interested in getting somewhere quickly, that's the time you might be interested in, you know, it's all about vacation for you, and you're spot on that, the data behind this, is actually from archival media, so adverts, yes, and also kind of newspaper articles and other forms of kind of contemporary culture. And you're also right that there's a bit of speculation going on as to which and perhaps that's kind of indicated in the kind of italics in the bottom right hand corner going into the future that what these new narratives might be emerging to kind of help or encourage people to stay on the ground. So yeah absolutely, and just to kind of close the circle, this was based on an academic article looking specifically around narratives of aviation in Sweden where there's been quite a big movement about staying on the ground and flight shame and things like that. OK, I'm conscious of time, I'm going to stop sharing my screen. I enjoyed reading your personal statement. One thing that stood out from your experience is that you spent quite a lot of time working with young children and you took a gap year and you've done some childminding and volunteering, so, and obviously you've just come to the end of your own schooling, so I was just wondering, having spent some time recently back in primary school, if I could ask you to reflect on Geography at school, thinking about, you know, you've now decided to apply for Geography at university, just reflecting on how Geography is taught, obviously it's got that name at secondary school, it might not be called Geography at primary school but its themes are still there, is there anything you think we should change about the way that Geography is taught at different levels through primary and secondary education?

I think that from what I understand Geography at primary or GCSE is quite different to what Geography is as you sort of move higher up, but I I think part of it is probably a bit inevitable, like with, I mean, it's the same case with GCSE chemistry, you get told that there's a completely different number of electrons in a shell, than what you get told at A level, which is different to what you get told at uni, because they have to necessarily simplify things to explain them at an appropriate level. So that's interesting because people in Chemistry often talk about stuff that you learn at certain ages is just wrong, is that and then they can completely re-teach you at A level, can you see any parallels there with Geography? Is there more continuity? I think what you get taught in Geography isn't wrong, it's just a simplified version I suppose, but I think it's still very interesting. I think there's just a popular misconception that Geography is just basically about rocks and volcanoes when in reality that's probably more Geology I suppose. I think it's very interdisciplinary so it's, you know, it's hard if not impossible to sort of box that into an academic subject which can be graded in the way that GCSE and A Levels are. Yeah, and this is a tricky question but which has been your least favourite part of the A Level curriculum?

Coastal management. OK, why is that?

I think there's not many places you can go with it, at least in the way that we're taught it, it's like there are a few applied case studies but for the most part it's very like A, B, C which is kind of what I get from my STEM, I do Biology and Chemistry as well and that's what I get from that, and so what I quite like about Geography is that you can sort of go more places with it and you can't do that as much when you're talking about coastal management. OK, great, thank you, so we're out of time but we just have a bit of time if you have any questions for us.

Not any that I can think of.

Hettie, thanks for joining us for the interview and we'll be in touch.

I think it would be great now if we could reflect on the interview, so Richard and Sam, what are your thoughts on where Hettie did well, any parts that perhaps she maybe struggled with or could have improved? So we'll hear from Richard first on the first section of the interview. Right, I'll talk about the discussion of the article. To put it in context the article was quite densely written and it's not straightforward, so one has to take that in that context, I doubt whether it's the kind of reading that an A-Level student would ordinarily do, so I think it is at the challenging end of of the spectrum. I thought Hettie had a good grasp of the content. I thought she picked out the absolutely key items in it as well. One notable characteristic of her responses and this probably applies to Sam's section as well, but we'll hear from Sam in due course, is that Hettie was often quite cautious and considered in her answers, and I think it's worth underlying the fact that that's absolutely fine, and it's so much better than someone who commits hard to a particular line in the interview and then is unbudgeable from it. So I felt that Hettie was taking time to think through the content, to sift through the material in her own head to come to a formulation and to an answer, and we encourage that - that's what we want to see in tutorials as well.

She also stuck to the content of the article, which is an important point here for us in the admissions process. Quite often we interview candidates who spend absolutely ages preparing and are busting with all sorts of background information and so on, and shoot off down tangents, and we find ourselves having to sort of fetch the discussion back to put it on track. It's very difficult for us to judge a candidate's capability if all they do is issue prepared material which is why we kind of insist on sticking to the article, so I was pleased that Hettie did that. In terms of the specific answers, I was pleased to see her making a separation between evidence and speculation, and she knew where that occurred in the article - that's very useful for us as tutors, it's the sort of thing that we rely on candidates being able to do, to know where an argument's gone too far or to know where an argument is unsupported. I think this is vital in the kind of intellectual pursuit of University. So those are some of the big picture things. I was pleased also with some of the details that Hettie fished out, noticing things like when the article was published. I mean, that's not crucial to the debate here, but we're looking at a candidate who does spot that kind of thing and it may be relevant sometimes, but as it turned out it was relevant to some of the questions that I later asked. So going back to the beginning, it was a difficult article, more at the research end, and bear in mind research is part of the degree course here. To be able to do good research you need to have a level of curiosity, you need to feed off things and I felt that there was evidence for that as well. And finally we are also looking for teachability alongside curiosity which is measured in iteration, it's measured in, and this didn't happen much in the interview, it's measured in terms of a candidate sticking to guns which are quite frankly wrong. This wasn't an example of that kind of an interview, but they do happen, and you cannot fetch a candidate back from that stance, and they sort of dig themselves deeper. So we're thinking about that teachability all the way through the interview as well. So I think those are the main things that I picked up, but for those of you who are watching and wondering about this article, again this was very much at the more difficult end of the spectrum. Thank you, so for me Hettie's answer really was a 10 out of 10 for for this, and so you know not all candidates are going to nail it as much as she did and that's fine, so she noticed a lot of things very quickly in the first, kind of, 20 seconds, she got a long way very quickly and that was noticing that it's about aeroplanes. There aren't that many clues and, you know, there's a lot going on when you first look at this image, but she saw the icons of the aeroplanes and she saw some of the language and picked that up straight away, zoomed in on the the y-axis which, as as we were talking about, it's not a kind of hard science type of graph, but it's put on a kind of conventional X/Y axis. So, you know, some candidates really take a long time to figure out that it's about aviation, so she got there very quickly. It was really good just to see that she was talking through what she was seeing and wasn't necessarily sat in silence although that can be fine too. You know, we can sit here for as long as people need really, but yeah, just kind of naming what was on the X-axis was really helpful and reading out some of the key words, and she very quickly began to kind of see that there was a story being told of different, you know, narratives or discourses. One thing I think Richard pointed out is that kind of flexibility of thinking, so when I asked about what kind of evidence might be behind this she said surveys, and that was fine, and then what I did, this is very typical of an interview, someone might kind of come up with an idea and then I just kind of reflect that back to them, I say, so, you know, if it were surveys how would that work? And, you know, are there any flaws in that logic? And Hettie being kind of flexible, without kind of digging her heels in, saw that probably that wasn't the best answer, and was able to just kind of pivot quickly and say, oh hang on, maybe there's some other types of evidence going on, and she just jumped straight to the right answer, which, you know, again, is not what we're looking for necessarily, it's about that thought process. So sometimes you might go, it's enough to say, well, you're right, surveys: how would you survey someone in the 50s? And people sometimes talk that through, like, well, you could survey older people who might have been alive and get them to think back in time, like, reflections on their life and how they've thought about aeroplanes over time, and these are all fine. But Hettie kind of jumped straight to a really great answer, which is, you know, looking at archive cultural materials. And that's exactly what this graph was based on, and so we got a long way very quickly, and I was able to kind of say, well, you know, could she pick out the differences between the different narratives there? So yeah, I couldn't have really, she couldn't have done much better.

And the final question, it's nice to be able to to get the time because a really high quality candidate will will cover ground quickly like I say, so therefore we were able at the end to have time to talk about her personal statement. Something that we like to ask is around kind of connecting geography to personal experiences, so maybe if someone's been traveling on their gap year or if they play sport or something like that it's always interesting to get them thinking about the geographical elements of that, and in this case thinking about Geography and how it changes and how we teach it differently for the different ages.

Yeah fantastic, thanks both, I think that flexibility thing that you mentioned is interesting and it's definitely always a good message for anyone who's invited to interview that it's definitely OK to kind of pause and take your time and think about an answer and change your mind when prompted and given new evidence as well, and that's a really key skill. So I think what we'll do now is maybe if we could offer a few tips or words of advice for any prospective candidates and Hettie if you could reflect on your experience both of this demonstration interview but also the the real interview that that you did before you became a student, and any tips for people in similar positions, and then we'll hear from Richard and Sam too.

Tips for interview, I think like Richard said just don't over prepare because quite frankly there's no point and I think it would make you more nervous, and because you've kind of got all of the stuff in your head which means that you're not just sort of looking at what they're giving. I think thinking out loud - I'm quite a slow thinker and so it does help to sort of verbalize things because otherwise you're sat there a bit like lemons.

I guess just try and relax as much as possible, like, it's supposed to mimic a tutorial conversation which wouldn't be, like, super high stress, so yeah I think honestly there's not much you can do to prepare except try and relax into it. Yeah definitely, I think the "say what you see" thing is really important too, just to go back to Sam's graph that he showed you, and sometimes you know, some tutors might in an interview show something with kind of even less clues on than that, and so just saying what you see and talking through it and responding to prompts is really important for those kind of questions.

Richard?

Thanks Dan, I suppose one of the secrets that candidates might be surprised about is that when you do these interviews, Sam and I are absolutely willing the candidates on, we really really want them to succeed, we're hoping that they do and, you know, interviews are strange things, you don't do them very often in your life. It's an us and them kind of thing going on, but mentally we are willing the candidates to close the gap with us, and to turn the thing into a conversation and to tell us where they're getting stuck. So that point about being shown a diagram like Sam's and and not knowing where the hell you are with it initially, I think a very useful thing to do is to verbalize your thoughts, and then that enables the interviewers to prompt you as well, and that's what learning is all about, it's about that iteration, it's not about sending someone away for three years hoping they get it at the end. It's about that iteration, which Oxford, in its method of teaching, has to hand, we're unusual in the sense that we spend a lot of time closely with students iterating stuff and teaching, for me personally, becomes a very pleasurable experience if you can do that, if you can do that iteration. And I guess that's what I was meaning about teachability and looking for a way you can help somebody and and move them forward.

So I think that's important to us, probably as important as if the person we're interviewing comes out with the right answer immediately.

Yeah definitely, as you said it links back to the idea of whether tutors actually would like to teach this this person, will they respond to new material effectively and are they interesting to have a discussion about the subject with. It's not always about getting the answer right the first time, because you know you might fluke a correct answer, what the tutors are looking for is the way that you think and how you arrive at that answer, and kind of arrive in the right way to, not necessarily the correct answer, that's about our learning style. Yeah, some of the things that we're trying to eke out, they're a hard test, they're hard to measure as well, like curiosity, and you kind of get a sense of that at the end rather than a measure of it. So some of the questions that we ask are definitely there to try and extract some sense of that curiosity, they're never really designed to try and catch people out and I think that stereotypical thing about Oxford is that we want to pin you in the corner and and fox you, it's so counterproductive for us if that's where you were, that's absolutely not what we're trying to do, it wouldn't help us at all. But we do want to to try and explore that curiosity, and sometimes it comes out in funny ways - you can ask a question which doesn't really have a particular academic angle to it that can extract the beautiful response in terms of what a person's curiosity might be, and occasionally that kind of thing does happen in the interview but it's by no means in there to try and fox people.

I forgot to say as well, I just wanted to point out that in my actual interview with Sam I did not get what the graph was, he had to tell me in the end so I just wanted to clarify, like, I'm going into the third year of this degree now and you know obviously it's a bit different but I didn't get it in my actual interview. Clearly it wasn't that much of a problem. Many people come out of an interview not knowing what the correct answer was, if they answered correctly, and go through the whole degree without ever knowing if they gave a correct answer to certain interview questions and the point that Richard made about, sort of, questions on how to trip you up is an important one as well because there wasn't perhaps so much of it in that interview, but in some interviews there are questions which do seem quite sort of, without an explicit link to Geography, and so one tip that I always say is to really think about, you know, why are the tutors asking me this question, and the answer is never to try and trip you up or make you look silly, or you know it's about thinking, where is the Geography? Where is the link to Geography in this question if it's not immediately obvious? And try to arrive at that through your thinking. Sam? Yeah, I think Hettie and Richard have covered this really well, one thing I would just point out is that like Richard said we're not looking for background knowledge here, in fact, you know, if you had done some paleoclimatology at school or if you've done a study on aviation at school it wouldn't really have helped you, and actually if you try to wedge in some background information then Richard would have said well, OK, but actually what we're really talking about is the article, and of course that's our effort to make sure that there's a level playing field, but actually it shows that, you know, the last thing you need to be doing is bringing your A-Level textbook and reading that half an hour before your interview, it's not about, you know, cramming at all, it's about thinking on your feet.

And it's not only about the interview as well because we've got all of the marks and records for the candidate, which is where that background information is better tested. It'd be far too hit and miss to try and test that in a 20-something minute interview, the sampling base would be awful, so you know that's another reason not to want to to focus heavily on specific content.

Absolutely, well thank you very much all for participating in that demonstration interview and thanks for your insights, I'm sure any prospective candidate will find that extremely useful, so thank you very much.