Tuesday 22nd July 2025
Blog Page 1835

Finalists feel the pain

Courtney Yusuf
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Finalists feel the pain

A new survey has reported that 59% students currently taking exams eat increased amounts of junk food while studying.

A new survey has reported that 59% students currentlytaking exams eat increased amounts of junk food while studying.
Consuming increased quantities of junk food is often connected with over-eating in order to cope with stress.
A second survey highlighted the fact that 1/5 of all students claim to have experienced anxiety attacks during the exam period, as well as 61% suffering from an inability to sleep and 51% from migraines.
Much of this stress can be traced back to the fact that 78% of students believe that the results of their exams will influence their career prospects upon leaving university.
Despite the health warnings that suggest increased junk food can actually lead to decreased productivity, 64% of students claim to be eating more chocolate, 61% are drinking more tea or coffee and 32% are drinking more energy drinks than normal.
Those finalists suffering from a lack of sleep may be unsurprised to hear that high levels of caffeine can drastically disrupt normal sleeping patterns.
Sam Hawkins, an English finalist, commented, “Some people ate lots more during revision, and some of that was probably food that’s not great for you, but some people found that they didn’t feel like eating because they were too stressed. 
“I’d say the more surprising thing was that only 20% of students say they suffered from anxiety attacks. Pretty much everyone I know has been incredibly stressed and anxious in the months before finals.”
One first-year student studying for Prelims said, “I know it’s not my finals, but it still feels like there’s a lot riding on these exams. Without a bike, I simply haven’t got time to go to Tesco’s all the time so why not just use the vending machine?”
Oliver Brann, editor of studentbeans.com stated, “With so much riding on exam results, including breaking into an already challenging job market, it seems students are putting their health at risk”.
An additional study however, conducted by Queen Margaret University, claims to have identified a possible solution: a daily drink of pomegranate juice.
Their study revealed that the juice caused a significant reduction in the level of the stress hormone cortisol in saliva and a significant reduction in systolic and diastolic blood pressure in all volunteers.
The study also reports that most subjects, upon consumption, felt less distressed, nervous and guilty about the stress surrounding their particular workplace.

Consuming increased quantities of junk food is often connected with over-eating in order to cope with stress.

A second survey highlighted the fact that 1/5 of all students claim to have experienced anxiety attacks during the exam period, as well as 61% suffering from an inability to sleep and 51% from migraines.

Much of this stress can be traced back to the fact that 78% of students believe that the results of their exams will influence their career prospects upon leaving university.

Despite the health warnings that suggest increased junk food can actually lead to decreased productivity, 64% of students claim to be eating more chocolate, 61% are drinking more tea or coffee and 32% are drinking more energy drinks than normal.

Those finalists suffering from a lack of sleep may be unsurprised to hear that high levels of caffeine can drastically disrupt normal sleeping patterns.

Sam Hawkins, an English finalist, commented, “Some people ate lots more during revision, and some of that was probably food that’s not great for you, but some people found that they didn’t feel like eating because they were too stressed.

“I’d say the more surprising thing was that only 20% of students say they suffered from anxiety attacks. Pretty much everyone I know has been incredibly stressed and anxious in the months before finals.”

One first-year student studying for Prelims said, “I know it’s not my finals, but it still feels like there’s a lot riding on these exams. Without a bike, I simply haven’t got time to go to Tesco’s all the time so why not just use the vending machine?”

Oliver Brann, editor of studentbeans.com stated, “With so much riding on exam results, including breaking into an already challenging job market, it seems students are putting their health at risk”.

An additional study however, conducted by Queen Margaret University, claims to have identified a possible solution: a daily drink of pomegranate juice.

Their study revealed that the juice caused a significant reduction in the level of the stress hormone cortisol in saliva and a significant reduction in systolic and diastolic blood pressure in all volunteers.

The study also reports that most subjects, upon consumption, felt less distressed, nervous and guilty about the stress surrounding their particular workplace.

Interview: Tom Stoppard

Archive
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Interview: Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard is probably Britain’s greatest living playwright. Having first made his name in 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a Beckett-influenced black comedy, he has written a new play almost every year since. His landmark works include Arcadia, which takes in chaos theory, landscape gardening and the Enlightenment/Romanticism dualism, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, which examines the Soviet regime’s practice of treating dissidents as though they were mentally ill; and the Coast of Utopia trilogy, which traces the story of some of the central figures in the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia as described in Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated work, Russian Thinkers.

Stoppard’s most recent play, Rock ‘n’ Roll, premiered on the West End in 2006. Its main subject is artistic repression in Communist Czechoslovakia, seen through the eyes of a young Czech PhD student called Jan who returns to his native country from Britain, where he has been studying, during the Prague Spring of 1968, a quasi-autobiographical, might-have-been version of Stoppard himself.

Towards the end of the play, there is a speech about Britain, one of the last things Stoppard has written for stage, in which a character announces, ‘This place has lost its nerve, they put something in the water since you were here. It’s a democracy of obedience. They’re frightened to use their minds in case their minds tell them heresy. They apologise for history. They apologise for good manners. They apologise for difference. It’s a contest of apology. You’ve got your country [Czechoslovakia] back. Why would you change it for one that’s fucked for fifty years at least?’

We started by asking him if he thought Britain really was a ‘democracy of obedience’ and ‘fucked for fifty years at least’. ‘It’s a point of view which becomes the utterance of a character in a play, and I tend to write plays where different characters argue on my behalf. But I must say I did think she had a point, put it that way. It’s not a very long speech, and it seemed to me then and now that one could – I wish I could – write a play which is essentially about that speech.’
Yet Stoppard seems to dislike playing the role of writer as social and political commentator: ‘English life has changed quite a lot in different ways, but what I think about it isn’t particularly novel or original: it’s become the commonplace of newspaper columnists and pub talk.’ Later, he added, ‘I’m quite good at finding out what I think by answering questions, but I don’t really have anything to sell, I don’t have a strong thesis.’

The Coast of Utopia trilogy is Stoppard’s deepest and most sustained engagement with the idea of the intellectual as a public figure. The Russian intellectuals it follows were some of the most important figures in Russian public life in the second half of the nineteenth century. We asked Stoppard if there was a moral clarity to their situation, living under the oppressive, backward Tsarist regime, which he felt he didn’t have as a citizen of a liberal democracy.

‘Yes, it’s not a terribly good reason for opting for suppression, but you’re absolutely right. I think it does crystallize one’s opinions. There’s an odd boundary between one’s true intellectually-derived opinions on questions on the one hand, and one’s temperament and one’s taste. Speaking for myself, my temperament is such that I’m quite persuadable. I find it very easy to agree with the last person who spoke and if I were in the kind of situation Havel was before 1989, I don’t think I’d have that difficulty when most of these questions come up. Clearly I knew which side I was on when it was somebody else’s business. I think that the area of the rule of law, and regulation, and authority in general is not as cut and dried as it was in communist Europe.’

He moved on to discuss one of the trilogy’s central characters, the critic Vissarion Belinsky. ‘He is given the choice of remaining in France, where he went for his health…and he couldn’t bear the cacophony of what, by those standards, was free expression. In other words, you could get into trouble for printing things but there was no pre-censorship – you could publish what you liked, whereas Belinsky had to be very, very clever to insinuate what his position was when he was writing under the eye of the Tzars and the secret police. That certainly clarifies things. You know where you stand. Belinsky, interestingly, chose to go home…he valued the focus and attention which his writing received because it was, in a sense, underground.’
Isaiah Berlin, whose work Russian Thinkers provides the historical basis and inspiration for the trilogy, notes in his introduction to the book that the politically-engaged character of much of the literary writing of those figures was a product of the censorship laws which precluded open political expression, and that criticism had to take metaphorical, allusive or allegorical forms.
Stoppard responded: ‘I do find that persuasive. Berlin is certainly a hero of mine and I certainly find that persuasive and deeply interesting. I don’t think it means, or I don’t think he meant, that a writer living in America or France or Britain, even at that time, was somehow incapacitated from producing the masterpieces or different kinds of masterpieces. Proust managed without the police eavesdropping on him, but yes I think it’s more true, really, that the kind of writing which emerged was shaped by the circumstances in which it was written, and I think Dostoevsky would certainly have been a different writer if he hadn’t been Russian at that time in Russian history.’

In Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, he famously expounds the idea that thinkers can be divided into two categories: hedgehogs, who see the world through one central idea (Berlin cites Plato, Dante, Hegel and Dostoevsky), and foxes, who doubt the world can be reduced to such an idea, and who delight in irreducible variety (Shakespeare, Molière,  Pushkin and Joyce). Berlin concludes that Tolstoy was a fox who wished he could be a hedgehog. Stoppard is, undoubtedly, a fox. His work sets up familiar dualisms and then erodes and mocks them; he refuses to present a straightforward argument for the critic to contend with. If he had an overarching theme to his work, it would be the absurdity of having an overarching theme. His playful and absurdist early work and his later, more serious work examining artistic repression coalesce around this.

We got the sense that there simply wasn’t one idea that could contain his curiosity. ‘I have a curious nature and I love to find things out and absorb them, but I think it’s a bit in-and-out. People show up who think that I’m still deep into moral philosophy because of a comedy I wrote in 1972 [Jumpers] or into quantum mechanics because of a play I wrote in 1988 [Hapgood]; and landscape gardening [Arcadia]. All these things were genuine interests that I got very deep into – well I can’t say very deep into them all because I wouldn’t be able to in the case of some of these things, like physics – but for a short, intense period my research, if you want to call it that, was my chief delight. And that’s still the case, except I’m still rather floundering for subjects.’
Stoppard also works in another register, writing and adapting for radio, television and film. Coming up, an adaptation of Parade’s End, Ford Maddox Ford’s quartet of novels about the First World War, as a five-part, one-hour per episode series for BBC 2; also, a recently finished adaptation of Anna Karenina for the director Joe Wright, due to go into production in September. Finally, he has been in discussion with Trevor Nunn about the latter’s plans to direct a new production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Haymarket. At 74, then, Stoppard’s irrepressible curiosity shows no sign of abating, for which we should be thankful.

Wage protestors invade Tescos

Robin Mcghee
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Wage protestors invade Tescos

The Oxford Living Wage campaign mounted what it called a ‘peaceable community action’ in three Tesco stores around Oxford on Thursday.

The Oxford Living Wage campaign mounted what it called a ‘peaceable community action’ in three Tesco stores around Oxford on Thursday. The campaign seeks to establish an increase in the minimum wage to up to £8.30, to take into account variations in living costs and price increases.
Earlier in the day, former OUSU President Stefan Baskerville spoke to around 60 local students and community activists in Lincoln chapel. The activists then went to Tesco stores where they spoke to staff and shoppers to hear their views on the potential for increased wages. 
Sarah Santhosham, Chair of the Oxford Living Wage campaign, condemned the current level of the minimum wage, saying, “It’s a pitiful amount of money. Nobody deserves to live on the minimum wage”.

The campaign seeks to establish an increase in the minimum wage to up to £8.30, to take into account variations in living costs and price increases.

Earlier in the day, former OUSU President Stefan Baskerville spoke to around 60 local students and community activists in Lincoln chapel. The activists then went to Tesco stores where they spoke to staff and shoppers to hear their views on the potential for increased wages.

Sarah Santhosham, Chair of the Oxford Living Wage campaign, condemned the current level of the minimum wage, saying, “It’s a pitiful amount of money. Nobody deserves to live on the minimum wage”.

The sun sets on Dream Pop Indie

Sam Johnstone
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The sun sets on Dream Pop Indie

Until recently you could most probably find me ambling around in a carefree manner, running my hands through my floppy hair, accompanied by whatever jangly Beach Boys inflected pop was deemed appropriate  by the Pitchforks and Urban Outfitters of this world.

It all got too much, and I realised that Dream  Pop’s tendency for faux psychedelic drivel was hiding what turned out to be the same old sickly sweet sensibilities of Feelgood Indie. And what’s more, it had seeped into my subconscious, destroying my vitality. I was a husk. A placid, foppish husk.

Having shaved off my locks, I vowed never again to sway politely at Sunday Roast, and set off in search of music with a harder edge. For a while now, the Vampire Weekend and Beach House tracks that pipe into Starbucks and Gap have seemed strangely discordant. I felt like a jealous onlooker glaring at the summer sun of an American Dream that I wasn’t invited to. 

Like Hunter S. Thompson blasted on acid in the early 70s, riding out the fag-end of the summer of love in a Las Vegas hotel room, new acts like Cults, Braids and Warpaint are trying to stretch the Dream Pop trip as far as it can go, still chasing the good vibrations whilst the rose-tint begins to fade around them.

The truth is, it’s just not cool to be naïve about the world anymore. Youth culture, which is so inseparable from pop music, has moved on from the hollowness of the hipster movement. A constant obsession with what has arbitrarily been proclaimed ‘cool’ in Vice Magazine has betrayed itself as dilettantism. 

It is no coincidence, then, that one of the most refreshing musical developments to take place in the last few months has been the emergence of melancholic dance. These downbeat sounds of a down-at-heel generation have a surprisingly popular appeal, as shown by the meteoric rise of Radio 1 darling James Blake. With the sparse and downbeat electronics of Nicolas Jaar and Ghostpoet’s introspective hip-hop beginning to cause a stir, there finally seems to be a legitimate challenge to the overwhelming insipidity of the psychedelic nothing.

Yet now as we near the end of our own age’s acid trip, with its highly subsidised tuition fees, a new America promised by the Obama administration, and the West’s capitalist dominance of the East all fading into our chemically frazzled collective memory there is a need more than ever for a new soundtrack. Will our new age of discontent and apathy be accompanied by – dare I say it – a new Punk?

Intern anger

Sophie Jamieson
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Intern anger

Over a hundred campaigners assembled outside Parliament on Wednesday to protest against unpaid internships.

Over a hundred campaigners assembled outside Parliament on Wednesday to protest against unpaid internships.
The protest, a joint venture between the NUS, Intern Aware and Internocracy, coincided with the launch of the Parliamentary Placement Scheme. The programme, spearheaded by Hazel Blears, will introduce a living wage for twelve recruits, who will work for the entire parliamentary session.
The interns will be paid £8.30 an hour, at an estimated cost of £175,000 for the first year. £25,000 of this will come from the Commons and the rest is hoped to be sourced from private sponsors.
Commenting on the scheme, Blears said, “The idea is that it’ll be a bit like a Rhodes scholar, something really prestigious”.
Ben Lyons, a finalist at St Catz and co-director of Intern Aware, said, “Hazel Blears’s scheme is excellent because it is cross-party and caters for people across the country. It’s a great first step but it doesn’t solve the problem – there’s still a lot to do.
“The scheme is only for twelve people, but there are about 450 interns in Parliament at any one time, most of whom are unpaid. People who are bright and capable are being denied careers because they can’t work for free.”
The campaigners took the opportunity of the protest to unveil an ‘Intern Bill of Rights’, which demands for interns “the same legal protections as all other workers” and “transparent and non-discriminatory” recruitment.
NUS Vice-President (Society and Citizenship), Susan Nash, said, “If MPs are not willing to treat interns as they do all other workers they cannot expect other industries to follow suit. Being an intern is not like work experience, it involves hard-work and long hours.”
The renewed campaign follows other action by Intern Aware, who last year questioned the legality of twenty-two MPs and one Lord advertising unpaid positions and in April exposed Nick Clegg’s non-payment of his own interns.
Lyons told Cherwell, “There are about 18,000 hours of unpaid work done every week in Parliament
“The word ‘intern’ has no legal value and most interns are in a legal sense ‘workers’, because they have set tasks and set hours. Employers who refuse to pay their interns are likely to be breaking the law.”
Nick Clegg recently pledged to end Westminster’s culture of privilege and start paying Lib Dem interns. However at the moment MPs and Liberal Democrat Head Office are still advertising for unpaid interns.

The protest, a joint venture between the NUS, Intern Aware and Internocracy, coincided with the launch of the Parliamentary Placement Scheme. The programme, spearheaded by Hazel Blears, will introduce a living wage for twelve recruits, who will work for the entire parliamentary session.

The interns will be paid £8.30 an hour, at an estimated cost of £175,000 for the first year. £25,000 of this will come from the Commons and the rest is hoped to be sourced from private sponsors.

Commenting on the scheme, Blears said, “The idea is that it’ll be a bit like a Rhodes scholar, something really prestigious”.

Ben Lyons, a finalist at St Catz and co-director of Intern Aware, said, “Hazel Blears’s scheme is excellent because it is cross-party and caters for people across the country. It’s a great first step but it doesn’t solve the problem – there’s still a lot to do.

“The scheme is only for twelve people, but there are about 450 interns in Parliament at any one time, most of whom are unpaid. People who are bright and capable are being denied careers because they can’t work for free.”

The campaigners took the opportunity of the protest to unveil an ‘Intern Bill of Rights’, which demands for interns “the same legal protections as all other workers” and “transparent and non-discriminatory” recruitment.

NUS Vice-President (Society and Citizenship), Susan Nash, said, “If MPs are not willing to treat interns as they do all other workers they cannot expect other industries to follow suit. Being an intern is not like work experience, it involves hard-work and long hours.”

The renewed campaign follows other action by Intern Aware, who last year questioned the legality of twenty-two MPs and one Lord advertising unpaid positions and in April exposed Nick Clegg’s non-payment of his own interns.

Lyons told Cherwell, “There are about 18,000 hours of unpaid work done every week in Parliament.

“The word ‘intern’ has no legal value and most interns are in a legal sense ‘workers’, because they have set tasks and set hours. Employers who refuse to pay their interns are likely to be breaking the law.”

Nick Clegg recently pledged to end Westminster’s culture of privilege and start paying Lib Dem interns. However at the moment MPs and Liberal Democrat Head Office are still advertising for unpaid interns.

 


Saying No(r)way to cliché

En Liang Khong
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Saying No(r)way to cliché

I’m definitely working in reaction to the perception of the female subject’, says Jenny Hval, ‘which is so often reduced to photoshopped, perfectly shaven parts. I find this a very evil part of modern society, obsessed with perfection and imperfection even more. So I really want to make music where there’s room for lots of imperfections’.

Hval, a vocalist, songwriter and novelist from Norway, has been rapidly establishing herself as a potent force within experimental music. She revels in her multiple artistic activities which include the publication of a mildly controversial novel, Perlebryggeriet (The Pearl Brewery). Her recent recording, Viscera, released under the great Rune Grammofon label, has attracted significant critical attention with comparisons being made to Kate Bush and Patti Smith. The first album under her own name (she has previously performed as Rockettothesky), Viscera weaves graphic, fantastical and feminist traditions through a haze of zither, church organ and psaltery. 

Hval sweetly opens the record with the provocative line, ‘I arrived in town with an electric toothbrush pressed against my clitoris’, subtly playing with the idea of explicit language. Speaking from her Oslo home, Hval reflects upon this lyric’s inherent instability. ‘It’s very interesting when I play it live because the audience reacts very differently. In Norway everybody laughs while in other places people tend not to. I’m trying to make the listener unsure – is it ironic or is it not?’

Hval’s music, revolving around her feminist explorations, finds itself mostly concerned with lyrics. ‘I’ve been wanting to find a way to express that language naturally’, she explains, ‘instead of seeking a more visceral quality of expression in a more punkish delivery. I’m not naturally like that in terms of the way I sing and speak so I wanted to use the more literary feminist tradition’. 

For Hval, lyrics guide her music. This literary focus, almost reversing the traditional creative process, stretches back to her experiences studying creative writing and theatre at the University of Melbourne. ‘I wrote a lot of monologues that I also wrote into songs in my spare time. When you have music, the lyrics get very focused on following that structure. I really loved the energy in going about it the other way around’.

Given the endless clichés of frozen landscapes and melancholy that insidiously creep into discussions around Nordic music, Hval’s intense relationship with the English language is particularly interesting. ‘I didn’t really start writing properly until I started writing in English,’ she reflects. ‘Getting away from the paradigm that decides what is good art in my country has always been very important for me. English was very liberating for me and allowed for a much more explicit language musically. I had the distance within myself to think of the words as sound instead of just meaning’. 

For Hval, it is entirely relevant that she is a Norwegian artist who does not fit into Norwegian pop music. She grew up listening to as much English folk music as she did to the Norwegian (Sami) folk tradition. An obsession with the English language and intonation courses through her music.

Above all, Hval’s music still sits defiantly on the margins. With her 2006 debut album To Sing You Apple Trees, Hval started out being near the mainstream, ‘which wasn’t what I wanted’, she observes. ‘Over the years I‘ve become more interested in the ephemeral quality of music and a lot less interested in the pop music repetitive form’. So where does Hval find herself now? ‘I think there are many ways of being in the margins’, she concedes. But tribal fandom and the cult of personality, which defines much of non-mainstream music, is not for her. ‘I think I will always stay a loner artistically’, she ventures. As Norway’s once very diverse musical output becomes increasingly commercialized, Jenny Hval’s lone voice could not be more timely.

Students show solidarity

Nupur Takwale
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Students show solidarity

Protesters holding banners and placards spelling out ‘NO CONFIDENCE’ lined up outside the Sheldonian Theatre on Tuesday afternoon to greet exiting academics with whoops and cheers upon news of the vote.

Protesters holding banners and placards spelling out ‘NO CONFIDENCE’ lined up outside the Sheldonian Theatre on Tuesday afternoon to greet exiting academics with whoops and cheers upon news of the vote.
Some had been there since 2pm, when the dons first entered Congregation, and despite the occassional rain shower were in just as positive a mood three hours later as they were when they turned up. 
Chants ran along the lines of “No ifs, no buts, no education cuts!” and “Education for the masses, not for the ruling classes!”
Students from Wadham, St Catz and Teddy Hall, who knew each other from Oxford University Campaign meetings, expressed confidence that the motion would pass, calling themselves “quite confident in no confidence”. Instead, the question which seemed to be on everyone’s minds was how big a majority would be. 
Hearing of the 283 – 5 result the protesters were “ecstatic”, seeing it as a confirmation of the strength of feeling against the government’s higher education policies. 
Owen Hubbard, a student at St John’s, said, “This sends out a really powerful message that academics, as well as students, are overwhelmingly fed up with Willetts’ incompetent and out-of-touch approach.” 
Another protester added, “these are the people that taught the government in the first place”.
Upbeat music accompanied the cheers, claps and whistles, bringing broad smiles to the faces of the tutors leaving Congregation, some of whom gave thumbs ups and raised arms to the crowd, to an even greater response. The general positive mood was enhanced when the sun chose that moment to come out.
As one student summarised it, “Today we’re here to try and express support for our tutors. This is a happy and peaceful protest which aims to give the resolution wider media attention, and raise the issue into national debate.”
Not all the protesters were students. Some were present simply to express “solidarity”. A passer-by, a Balliol alumnus who came up in 1961, commented, “All over the world universities have become very passive – now, thank God, this is changing.” 
He drew links to the worldwide student protests of 1968, which had humble beginnings in movements similar to the gathering outside the Sheldonian. 
“Protests like these make all the difference,” he said. “They add up.”

Some had been there since 2pm, when the dons first entered Congregation, and despite the occassional rain shower were in just as positive a mood three hours later as they were when they turned up.

Chants ran along the lines of “No ifs, no buts, no education cuts!” and “Education for the masses, not for the ruling classes!”

Students from Wadham, St Catz and Teddy Hall, who knew each other from Oxford University Campaign meetings, expressed confidence that the motion would pass, calling themselves “quite confident in no confidence”. Instead, the question on their minds was how big a majority it would be.

Hearing of the 283-5 result the protesters were “ecstatic”, seeing it as a confirmation of the strength of feeling against the government’s higher education policies.

Owen Hubbard, a student at St John’s, said, “This sends out a really powerful message that academics, as well as students, are overwhelmingly fed up with Willetts’ incompetent and out-of-touch approach.”

Another protester added, referring to the dons, “these are the people that taught the government in the first place”.

Upbeat music accompanied cheers, claps and whistles as tutors left Congregation, some of whom gave a thumbs up in response. 

As one student summarised it, “Today we’re here to try and express support for our tutors. This is a happy and peaceful protest which aims to give the resolution wider media attention, and raise the issue into national debate.”

Not all the protesters were students however. Some were present simply to express “solidarity”. A passer-by, a Balliol alumnus who came up in 1961, commented, “All over the world universities have become very passive – now, thank God, this is changing.”

He drew links to the worldwide student protests of 1968, which had humble beginnings in movements similar to the gathering outside the Sheldonian. “Protests like these make all the difference,” he said. “They add up.”

One in six Oxbridge applicants use company for help

Anthony Collins
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One in six Oxbridge applicants use company for help

Cherwell can reveal that nearly one in six Oxbridge applicants register for the services of Oxbridge Applications, an independent profit driven company which sells university admission advice.

On average, between 5,000 and 6,000 students contact Oxbridge Applications each year, while the overall number applying to Oxbridge is around 34,000 and growing each year.

Founded in 1999, Oxbridge Applications is fast growing. The profits of the parent company, Application Research Limited, have increased by over 150% in the last year, from £67, 115 in 2010 to £110, 552 in 2011.

The company offer Admissions Tests Seminars for £185, Private Consultations for £240, Interview Preparation Days from £220, and an Interview & Admissions Test Weekend for £1500.

Oxbridge Applications claim that an average of 53% of those accepted for the Premier Service, which costs up to several thousand pounds, gain offers to Oxford or Cambridge, compared with an average of just 21% for Oxbridge applicants overall.

Oxford University was quick to distance itself from the company. A University spokesperson said, “We do not endorse any commercial operations or publications offering advice or training on our admissions process.”

Academic staff were also sceptical. Dr Peter Bull, Tutor for Admissions at Hertford, said, “Colleges will be happy to give advice free of charge. Why be charged by a consultant when you can ask the person who selects the candidates, at no cost?”

Rachel Spedding, Executive Director of Oxbridge Applications and a former student at Worcester College, told Cherwell that the company work with current and former students.

Dr Lucinda Rumsey, Admissions Tutor at Mansfield, said, “Students are not necessarily clearly informed about what tutors are looking for in the interview and other parts of the process. I am really disappointed that students get involved in this.”

Alex Bulfin, OUSU VP for Access and Academic Affairs, said, “This sends a message to prospective students that there is a ‘secret’ to winning a place here and that if you haven’t been coached in ‘the right way’ then you won’t stand a chance.”

However, not all students were as damning of the company. Thomas O’Brien, a first-year PPE student who attended an Oxbridge Applications preparation day said, “It would probably have been useful to people who, unlike me, didn’t get much help from their schools.”

A third year History student who used the company’s Access Scheme said, “My school did not have a history of sending people to Oxbridge, so it was really good to meet people who’d been through the admissions process and could tell me what it was like.”

Spedding highlighted the access schemes which the company runs. She said, “We are not helping people get in ‘through the back door’. It’s people’s choice if they want to use our services.”

The University urged that, “The best advice is to work hard, and make full use of the many free and authoritative sources of guidance and information the University itself provides.”

Penny Pinching: 7

Nick Pointer
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Penny Pinching: 7

Cameron’s saying it. Lord Sugar’s saying it. Even Danni, last week’s page 3 model, is ‘glad to hear the government’s plans to encourage entrepreneurship by cutting red tape and lowering corporation tax.’  The message is, this country needs more entrepreneurs to raise UK innovation and give a much needed boost to the economy, and the conveyor belt from Oxbridge to the major banking and consultancy firms isn’t exactly helping encourage original thought. So put down that PWC application and listen up.

You may be wondering why in a money saving column I’m banging on about the next Richard Branson. Yet even if we disregard the cut in pay from a decent starting salary of £30k upwards in a cushy graduate job to effectively zero working for yourself, the large amounts of stress, lack of sleep and the physical and financial drain that a new business poses, there’s never been a better time to go it alone.
You might not be aware that we’re in the middle of a boom for online tech start-ups, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the late 90s. Then, the bursting of the dot com bubble followed astronomical valuations of online businesses relative to their profits, with the fall-out being felt in stock markets worldwide. Since Facebook started their march to worldwide domination in 2004, the social landscape online has been gradually divided up between different sites which each want to manage a different aspect of our online life – micro-blogging with Twitter, content discovery with StumbleUpon, business connections with LinkedIn and so on. New music sites are popping up and drawing in the masses – out of the top players, Spotify is probably the most well-known, with Soundcloud, Mixcloud and Wonga being the other front runners. 
All of this is in the face of a concerted effort by the government to encourage entry to the market with a wide range of financial stimuli for budding-entrepreneurs. A quick search on the internet reveals plenty of investment boards offering grants for innovation in their particular sectors, with some ranging from £25k for proof-of-market to £250k for prototype development – if that isn’t an incentive to get out and do your own thing, I don’t know what is.
In addition to grants, there are a growing number of ‘start-up incubators’ popping up. These provide funding to early stage start-ups, and provide support to get the product from an idea to a fully-fledged company. The most well-known of these are the US-based Y-Combinator and TechStars, but aside from the big boys with multi-million pound budgets, there are plenty of smaller players out there, which are, by necessity, more likely to specialise in much more restricted markets, and thus present a greater likelihood of investment.
A perfect example of this dropped into my inbox this morning with the JCR notices – a start-up incubator especially for Oxford students, BetaFoundry, offer the usual gubbins; funding (admittedly barely more than expenses), office space and mentoring, with the bonus that they’re only considering teams from Oxford Uni. This is just the kind of limited market in which your likelihood of being picked up is massively increased, and with the market in its current state, I would wager there’s more than enough room for some decent UK based entrepreneurs to break out. That, or you’ve already stopped reading and are back to consultancy applications. 

You may be wondering why in a money saving column I’m banging on about the next Richard Branson. Yet even if we disregard the cut in pay from a decent starting salary of £30k upwards in a cushy graduate job to effectively zero working for yourself, the large amounts of stress, lack of sleep and the physical and financial drain that a new business poses, there’s never been a better time to go it alone.

You might not be aware that we’re in the middle of a boom for online tech start-ups, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the late 90s. Then, the bursting of the dot com bubble followed astronomical valuations of online businesses relative to their profits, with the fall-out being felt in stock markets worldwide. Since Facebook started their march to worldwide domination in 2004, the social landscape online has been gradually divided up between different sites which each want to manage a different aspect of our online life – micro-blogging with Twitter, content discovery with StumbleUpon, business connections with LinkedIn and so on. New music sites are popping up and drawing in the masses – out of the top players, Spotify is probably the most well-known, with Soundcloud, Mixcloud and Wonga being the other front runners.

All of this is in the face of a concerted effort by the government to encourage entry to the market with a wide range of financial stimuli for budding-entrepreneurs. A quick search on the internet reveals plenty of investment boards offering grants for innovation in their particular sectors, with some ranging from £25k for proof-of-market to £250k for prototype development – if that isn’t an incentive to get out and do your own thing, I don’t know what is. In addition to grants, there are a growing number of ‘start-up incubators’ popping up. These provide funding to early stage start-ups, and provide support to get the product from an idea to a fully-fledged company. The most well-known of these are the US-based Y-Combinator and TechStars, but aside from the big boys with multi-million pound budgets, there are plenty of smaller players out there, which are, by necessity, more likely to specialise in much more restricted markets, and thus present a greater likelihood of investment.

A perfect example of this dropped into my inbox this morning with the JCR notices – a start-up incubator especially for Oxford students, BetaFoundry, offer the usual gubbins; funding (admittedly barely more than expenses), office space and mentoring, with the bonus that they’re only considering teams from Oxford Uni. This is just the kind of limited market in which your likelihood of being picked up is massively increased, and with the market in its current state, I would wager there’s more than enough room for some decent UK based entrepreneurs to break out. That, or you’ve already stopped reading and are back to consultancy applications. 

Great Sexpectations: Volume Seven

Cherwell Lifestyle Section Editors
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0
Great Sexpectations: Volume Seven

The best thing about a fall, surely, is the potential it provides for a comeback. This is what’s crossing my mind as I sit in the library, the ice queen and I, in the corner on an upper floor, secreted between two bookstacks. It’s late into the night, and my thoughts were, until an hour ago, solely focused on the unfinished essay waiting downstairs for me, glaring out from the computer screen. The library is quieter now, post-midnight; when I trudged upstairs for a book, I was disturbed by the sound of footfall. She came up and, seeing me, came over to talk. The reality of the situation is laughably casual, for we are both slumming about, both in not-our-best jeans, her in a plain vest and me in a t-shirt. Yet the conversation becomes intimate, as she discards the persona that she has supposedly been assuming for the past weeks, and the strangeness of the situation fades as she opens up. She tells me of the planned fun in baiting a random person, and how the recent development between my best friend and I changed her perspective; the challenge started to possess too much destructive potential. I tell her how the relationship between the two of us has stalled, despite being amicable again since the Fuzzys disaster. My best friend then fades from thought, among the jokes, the flirting, and the occasional flash of old siren qualities, but which now are transposed, genuine and exciting, into the true person.

At some trivial little moment where we laugh together I lean over and kiss her. As I move I see a little flash of surprise at the suddenness of the movement, but then our eyes close and I can feel the arching corners of her mouth as she smiles through the kiss. In the culture of drunk encounters I’ve been exposed to this term, our library rendezvous reminds me that the sober kiss remains the most incredible thing – a relatively superficial embrace reinforced by substantial feeling. I can remember the feel of her wet body against mine, a weeks-old image given new vitality, and at this point I don’t care about the challenge, or any plans for relationships. I want to have sex with her, not through any vague ideas about status, but with the most exhilarating reckless intent.
She can tell, and she responds, pulling me to my feet from our place on the floor. We rush back to my room, and she pulls me against the door in a long-savoured kiss, my hands fumbling for the key as we pull away. She watches with coy amusement as I realise, horrified, that it must have fallen out on the library floor. There is a pause as we look each other, the electricity fading at the thought of traipsing to her room, before she pulls at my hand. I’m led downstairs and out into the still summer night, towards some grassy corner secluded in the early morning darkness. She smiles again, our bodies come together, and I’m all expectation.

The best thing about a fall, surely, is the potential it provides for a comeback. This is what’s crossing my mind as I sit in the library, the ice queen and I, in the corner on an upper floor, secreted between two bookstacks. It’s late into the night, and my thoughts were, until an hour ago, solely focused on the unfinished essay waiting downstairs for me, glaring out from the computer screen. The library is quieter now, post-midnight; when I trudged upstairs for a book, I was disturbed by the sound of footfall. She came up and, seeing me, came over to talk. The reality of the situation is laughably casual, for we are both slumming about, both in not-our-best jeans, her in a plain vest and me in a t-shirt. Yet the conversation becomes intimate, as she discards the persona that she has supposedly been assuming for the past weeks, and the strangeness of the situation fades as she opens up. She tells me of the planned fun in baiting a random person, and how the recent development between my best friend and I changed her perspective; the challenge started to possess too much destructive potential. I tell her how the relationship between the two of us has stalled, despite being amicable again since the Fuzzys disaster. My best friend then fades from thought, among the jokes, the flirting, and the occasional flash of old siren qualities, but which now are transposed, genuine and exciting, into the true person.

At some trivial little moment where we laugh together I lean over and kiss her. As I move I see a little flash of surprise at the suddenness of the movement, but then our eyes close and I can feel the arching corners of her mouth as she smiles through the kiss. In the culture of drunk encounters I’ve been exposed to this term, our library rendezvous reminds me that the sober kiss remains the most incredible thing – a relatively superficial embrace reinforced by substantial feeling. I can remember the feel of her wet body against mine, a weeks-old image given new vitality, and at this point I don’t care about the challenge, or any plans for relationships. I want to have sex with her, not through any vague ideas about status, but with the most exhilarating reckless intent. She can tell, and she responds, pulling me to my feet from our place on the floor. We rush back to my room, and she pulls me against the door in a long-savoured kiss, my hands fumbling for the key as we pull away. She watches with coy amusement as I realise, horrified, that it must have fallen out on the library floor. There is a pause as we look each other, the electricity fading at the thought of traipsing to her room, before she pulls at my hand. I’m led downstairs and out into the still summer night, towards some grassy corner secluded in the early morning darkness. She smiles again, our bodies come together, and I’m all expectation.

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