Succeed in your interview and get onto that English university course

Any joy with university interviews? English is a tough course to get onto – though great to do once you get there!

Interviewers want to see that you have grasped the texts you are studying, but also that you have read beyond them.

What connections can you see between one text an author has written and others written before it or afterwards? E.g. if you’re studying Tess, how does it relate to an earlier work by Hardy such as Far From The Madding Crowd? How does an author’s output echo the themes / subject matter of contemporaries?

An interviewer always sits up when you notice that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for example, draws on the same gothic elements that Austen mocks in Northanger Abbey, published the same year.

It can be tougher to connect with what was going on in society at the time. I remember an interviewer asking me why Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 referred to ‘bare ruin’d choirs’ and I was so relieved I remembered about Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530’s!

Knowledge like this can make the difference between the university offering you a place or not. You’ll find Crossref-it.info provides a quick way of finding out all the contextual information you need to help you shine in an interview.

And yes, it can mean hours of curling up with a book. But hopefully that’s why you want to take English anyway!