By Jenny Bates
With interview season here, I’ve been thinking about my own experience of interviewing for PPE at Oxford, so I’ve written a little bit about one of the questions that I was asked in my interview. But firstly, the usual disclaimer that this is just my personal experience and every interview is different – so don’t try and plan for any particular question!
I was given some pre-reading about an hour before the interview, a short article – just a couple of pages long - about whether or not it is ever right to sell citizenship. Knowing nothing about this issue until about an hour before my interview was definitely really nerve-wracking, but the tutors really did not expect us to have any subject knowledge beforehand.
After talking about the article, the interview ended with the big question ‘is there anything we should never buy and sell?’. This question definitely took me by surprise and coming up with an answer to such a big question was difficult. I’m pretty sure I rambled on desperately trying to come up with something coherent to say!
But I think I missed the fact that this is the type of question that really allows you to show how you think. There was no need for me to answer with an eloquently argued defence of why we should never be able to sell our human rights, I just needed to show that I could engage with the question! These are two things I would have, with hindsight, done differently if I was asked a similar question again!
Take a minute! It’s okay to stop for a few seconds to collect your thoughts and breathe. I felt like I was under pressure to say something to avoid any silence, but pausing for a few moments to think about the question is a really good way to start.
Don’t rush into giving an answer to the question, it’s fine to start by deconstructing the question and showing that you are engaged with the issues. When big questions are asked in interviews it is impossible to give a definitive answer so try and approach it as more of a discussion.
There are so many ways you could approach the topic of citizenship and whether there are certain things we should never buy or sell. Maybe you could consider how selling citizenships further entrenches inequalities by making the richest more internationally mobile, or you could argue there is something about citizenship that means it should not be commodified. There are so many different ways to approach these big questions, none of them any more the right answer than another, so take your time and approach the question as a discussion.