A huge amount of student attention is always – and understandably – given to the Personal Statement part of the application. It’s definitely the thing that students feel they can ‘control’ the most, and improve the most – but it’s not the only thing that Admissions Tutors will consider, and it’s important that the whole application is given due care and attention.

Booking additional tests and checking calendar windows in early September

All details of how to book, and information for students is here: Thinking Skills Assessments.

For most years, the candidate booking date for the TSA is well before the October 15 deadline for the UCAS deadline. Don’t get caught out by that!

For a new centre or school, these tests will need to be run in exam conditions by authorised centres only. You’ll need to apply for that – perhaps worth talking to your exams office to see if you’re a Cambridge centre already – and check details here: adminnistering TSA as a centre. The deadline is 16 September – well before the admissions deadline. Again, don’t get caught out!

Decision-making on College choices

College choices can be an important part of the decision-making choices for students.

However, it’s important to recognise that candidates don’t have to make a college choice. They are able to submit an “open application” to the subject, rather than to an individual College. The admissions team will then allocate the candidate to a College.

If you want to choose a College, then it’s worth checking which offer Geography. Not all Oxford Colleges do, while Cambridge seems to have a wider spread. You can see details here:

• Oxford College choices for Geography
• Cambridge College choices for Geography

Beyond ‘do they offer Geography?’, College choice is a very personal decision. You’ll get the same Geography experience and access to facilities at university level, so there’s not a huge amount of academic difference between them. It’s very much about what ‘fits’ with your own personal preferences and thoughts about your life. You might like to think about:

• The location of the College relative to what you’re interested in (Geography Department, libraries, river, centre of town)
• The size of the College and how many Geographers you’d be working with
• The resources and accommodation offer of the College

The best way is often to get a sense of the ‘feel of a place’ on Open Days. If you want to make a College choice, I’d strongly suggest that you go and see a few Colleges to make an informed decision!

Ensure the whole application process is considered

Your UCAS application form will be sent – blind – to all of your universities at once. They won’t know where else you’ve applied, but they might be able to guess that a high grade prediction application that comes to them before the 15^th October is likely to also be applying to Oxford or Cambridge!

You need to select a reasonable profile for your applications and choices.

First, it’s advised and likely that you will be applying for similar courses at all five universities. This means your personal statement and reference will be coherent, and align with what you think is important for those courses.

Second, to lower your risks, it’s normally advised that you should have a range of university entry requirements in your application. Let’s say you’re applying to Oxford (A*AA) – you might also want to have another 1-2 at the same grade. But you might also want to have an AAA or even AAB choice in your five, to give you an insurance offer. There’s no point having a firm choice and insurance that are the same grade – if the summer results aren’t what you want, you’ll have missed both universities!

Don’t make your entire UCAS process about the Oxbridge application – it’s just one of five, remember! Double check all of the application details, make sure all of the grades, course choices and university selections are accurate and exactly what you want before you hit send!

The school reference

It’s often helpful to have reference support, particularly if you’re writing for the first time. You’ll want to deliberately dovetail your reference to the application components. You want to ensure that the same ideas and highlights are supported exactly, and that you’re able to emphasise the core elements of an excellent application too.

You can also talk about what might overlap and link – ensuring that the candidate can free up space in their personal statement to talk about something different than you cover in the reference.

It’s also helpful to have a context statement put in place for your school. An example of the historic grade profile, and a judgement sense of the candidate (“this is the best Geographer we have seen in five years”, or “in a class of excellent Geographers, X stands far above in their scholarship and engagement. Their EPQ on…”) can help to give the admissions tutor a sense of how this person compares to other candidates.  

A high-quality academic reference can be quite tricky to write, so do seek wider support – Head of Sixth Form, any Oxbridge contacts – if it’s your first time.

Cambridge – Supplementary Application Questions

For admissions at Cambridge, all subjects complete an additional Supplementary Application Questionnaire (SAQ). This is available to candidates, and guidance is provided to support the completion. Once your UCAS application has been received by the University, they’ll send you details to the email address that you applied with.

Like UCAS, it’s an online questionnaire with lots of details – and takes time and precision to do right. Unlike UCAS, it’s highly personal and tailored only to Cambridge – including some of your additional information and an additional depth to some of the AS/A Level subject details, or further biographical information. Cambridge are slightly more advanced in their use of socio-economic data in supporting applications, so don’t be surprised to be asked details about whether you were eligible for Free School Meals etc.

You’ll also have the option of sharing further information (e.g. extenuating circumstances, particular personal or additional needs) and making additional personal statement of up to 1200 characters. It’s worth thinking about how you want to use these things – and to consider them alongside your existing personal statement. Repetition is unnecessary – and this offers you a chance for bespoke Cambridge-specific thoughts about why a particular course or structure suits you.

Most candidates will have to complete this within about 10-14 days of the original UCAS deadline, so be prepared for this if you’ve applied to Cambridge!

By early October, all of this will be well underway, and hopefully, you’ll be ready to submit on time, with any additional testing requirements, with a quality application showing the best of your Geography candidate’s ability.

You’ll also want to be considering support and preparation for the other phases of assessment that are important.

In the introduction post, I’ve shared some resource for personal statements – the things to think about, and a structure of a worksheet that might help people get started. There’s a lot of advice and guidance about how to write personal statements around, which I don’t intend to repeat.

In this section, I want to think specifically about how personal statements for Oxbridge candidates differ, and what you need to be aware of in supporting them.

1. They’re not. Don’t forget that the same personal statement is sent to all five of the candidate’s universities, and they all see it. While they have anonymous levels of detail in the application process, and it’s ‘blind’ to a limited extent, it’s important to recognise that the same statement has to work for all of the applications that the student is making. It needs to be high quality Geography, and not perfectly and individually tailored for Oxbridge – it’s only one application of five.
2. Generally, the higher quality candidates for Geography at university spend more time talking about Geography than themselves. They have meaningful statements about why they want to study Geography, normally connected to an experience or academic interest, and they explore how they’ve demonstrated their scholarship and engagement over their development and Sixth Form period. While there’s always a need to balance “statement” and the “personal” element in the application, typically a top Geography candidate will prioritise the academic components.
3. Recognise that for Oxbridge candidates, it is only one part of the application process. For Cambridge, in particular, there’s a Supplementary Application Questionnaire which has further questions and the space to make an additional personal statement. They shouldn’t overlap, and the statements need to be considered in coherence.
4. All candidates must sign to declare that their application and statement is true to the best of their beliefs, and all personal statements need to be accurate and factually correct. However, unlike most candidates, the personal statement for an Oxbridge candidate can often form the basis of easy questions to be used in an interview. So if a student were to mention a book, or a paper, or a particular concept, it is absolutely fair game for the interviewer to explore and test them in an interview. It’s also critical that you support the student in double checking their references and thinking. Look at the research interests of the likely interviewers at their College choice (if they’ve made one), and check that if their statement overlaps with the research interests of their interviewers, they know it thoroughly!
5. The phrase “too many cooks spoil the broth” was obviously not designed to refer to Oxbridge personal statements, but it should be. The more ‘high stakes’ the outcome, the more likely you are to have multiple people look at it. This can be amazing, if the advisors are all philosophically and Geographically aligned, but more often than not, it just results in a slightly messy experience for the candidate, where they’re chopping and changing depending on specific advice and guidance. Less is more in this instance – keep a few advisers who know their Geography and, ideally, their Oxbridge statements, and try to limit the spread of the coaching process!

So, let’s revisit the ideas of Geographical scholarship we discussed earlier, and how each of the components can be demonstrated within a personal statement. 

They can demonstrate scholarship and critical engagement

Normally this is demonstrated through clear engagement with books, papers or lectures, and the ideas that they represent. These should be academically well grounded – popular literature has a place (e.g. Tim Marshall’s books), but top level students need to demonstrate their higher reading abilities. It should be well beyond the confines of an A Level syllabus – merely talking about what you’ve been taught won’t demonstrate your ability to engage with the subject beyond what you’re given! It’s important that students write clearly about what they are taking from the reading, and showing their connection and synthesis ability. This should be balanced with some kind of critical reflection – what the student has learned, what they’ve taken away, and how that helps to support their engagement and academic curiosity.

It’s important that this is selectively explored, rather than dumping enormous quantities of quasi-academic research in a statement.

Complexity and range of the discipline

This is where the second component of the scholarship thinking comes in. Encourage students to be specific in what they focus on. They shouldn’t attempt to describe all of Geography, or even all of what they’ve read or studied.

Be critical and selective – pick an idea that is interesting and has come from somewhere (e.g. an unexplained part of the A Level course, a particular experience) and work through it. It’s okay for it to be a fairly narrow and specific focus and exciting aspect of Geography. Show how some of the reading connects the wider A Level study profile, then to other parts of the reading, and how the journey and thought process of development happens. It’s important to be able to clearly explain how one aspect of the engagement leads to another, and ‘show your working’ and how the thinking develops.

This is how the final strand is important for the personal statement. The complexity and development of ideas needs to be well-woven together, and clearly communicated as a story and narrative.

Explaining and exploring the ideas

The interview phase is where students will be pushed hardest to explain their academic thinking and development of ideas. However, students can start to demonstrate their abilities to express themselves clearly in their personal statement and application.

The Geographical content is elsewhere for now – in terms of writing and writing style, my top resources are Simon Sinek’s TED Talk on ‘starting with why’ and great communication is a really good way to shake up the thinking. It’s about explaining intent rather than a litany of factual information – and it’s critical that the candidate is able to link things together to tell the story of why they wanted to study a thing, find out more, and ultimately read Geography. I’ve tried lots of ways to help students “get it” – but this is a short video that’s had quite a bit of success.

Story telling is critical. Assembling that CV of all the things they’ve done feels positive and seductive – like a safety blanket. The brave and difficult decisions are about how you decide what to leave out, and where you spend more time explaining how you learned from something, or how you connected it to something else!

As ever, there’s got to be a balance between “personal” and “statement”. While a more academic applicant will normally have more academic content than their extra curricular or evidencing personal characteristics, that doesn’t mean that it can’t reflect who they are, and what they’re interested in. The statement must help the tutors to understand the person they’re going to offer an interview to, and be interesting and informative for them to read!

As with all personal statements for UCAS applications, remember:

1. It always takes longer than you think, and;
2. It always takes more drafts than you think, but;
3. It’ll never be “done”. At some point, you’ll just stop writing.  

So, getting candidates started early, showing them good examples, good guidance is really helpful. Ideally, get some ideas on paper (even if it’s just the worksheet) before summer, and get some thinking and revision time over summer – so that September is starting with solid ground work.

There’s a lot to do in that month, and it’s important that you’ve got a heads up of the attention to detail and preparation that’s needed for September. The transition in to interview and test prep (if appropriate) will start sooner than the application deadline – so it’s worth ensuring you’ve got a plan to hit the ground running.

Great candidates to read Geography at university have a deep and meaningful relationship with aspects of the subject and discipline. They are, fundamentally, motivated to study Geography at university, because they’ve found parts of it intellectually fascinating and enjoyable – and great applicants are able to demonstrate this in their application.

I think there are three key components that make great Geography candidates:

They can demonstrate scholarship and critical engagement.

This is simply a sense of reading and thinking about what you’ve read. The best Geographers – even just when we consider this in terms of an A Level essay, for example – are able to recognise lots of ideas, lots of case studies and examples, and evaluate and think about what that means. They don’t accept ideas at face value, but are able to thoughtfully incorporate them in to their existing understanding.

And, just like in our A Level experience, the best Geographers are able to play at a level above their existing understanding. They’re able to demonstrate engagement with undergraduate quality thinking (or beyond!), rather than sticking closely to the confines of their specification and taught course. Most often, this is demonstrated in an application through reading or engagement activities (e.g. RGS lectures, speaker events etc.).

Complexity and range of the discipline.

Geography is a huge subject, and there are lots of areas of it which have their own focus and specialisation. A great Geography candidate is able to recognise that there’s a lot of ideas out there, and that you *don’t* have to engage with, or indeed, be an expert on all of them.

In an application, then, it’s often better to show deeper engagement with a smaller slice of the discipline – I am interested in X, so I read Y, and followed that up with Z, and explored that further with A, B and C – rather than trying to show that you know all of the bits of Geography in a very limited or superficial way. Again, this is really about critical and sustained engagement – rather than brief and light touch!

Explaining and exploring the ideas.

Fundamentally, the biggest differentiation between Oxford & Cambridge (and a couple of other places) and other universities is the focus on dialogic teaching as the key focus of your student experience. As well as lectures, seminars and workshops that you’d have at any Geography Department, you’ll get regular discussions and debates in small groups. At Oxford, they’re called tutorials, and Cambridge call them supervisions. But at heart, you’re expected to be able – and willing – to discuss your ideas regularly with your tutor and peers, and hold your own in an academic conversation about the particular topic in question.

So, you need to be able to talk coherently about your subject. This isn’t really something that gets discussed in your initial application phases, but it’s the primary purpose of the interview phase.

I’ve said before that I believe the best way of doing this is through a ‘rich diet of Geography education’ from start to finish. We want thoughtful, engaged and enthusiastic Geographers in all of our lessons – and good dialogic teaching helps to model the scholarship and communication elements. The more students can hear and see what academic Geographical discussion looks like in their day to day, the less work they’ll have to do to prepare specifically for the application phase.

As we come towards the Sixth Form, though, I think it’s worth having some strategies in place for explicitly raising the level of engagement and scholarship, and making it accessible and normal for students to explore the world of academic Geography:

1. Consider whether your school can support and subscribe to journals or publications so they can regularly be visible to students. You might like to get them to explore the GA’s GEO platform, or some of the additional resources on the RGS website
2. Can you subscribe to the Royal Geographical Society so that you have access to lectures and speaker programmes?
3. Alternatively, can you set up a Geographical Society for Sixth Form students to speak – and hear guest speakers – in your own school, or nearby schools? If you’ve got good connections with careers leaders, or former students, they can be really helpful to push towards interesting topics to cover! If you have students doing EPQs, or extended essays and similar thoughts – then getting them to show and talk about their work can be really powerful as a demonstration of academic thinking.
4. Depending on your school and Department context, it’s interesting to think about what access to books and reading your students might have. You might be able to work with your library team, if you have one, to get great material in. If that’s not an option, a few books each year can soon build up a Department library of great reading material that can be kept in one of your classrooms, or a shared office space. Having the ability to say “oh, yes, you should read…. this book on that interesting question”, and be able to recommend and hand the student the book sends a really powerful message about academic reading, and makes it part of the normal process.

This helps to prepare students for the three parts of excellent Geography, and gives them interesting points for research to make decisions about what to apply for, and exactly what to look for in their decision-making process.

It’ll also be a key part of preparing for the personal statement process, and I think should be the key focus for Year 12 and the summer period.