Churchill College, University of Cambridge
Our Fellows and students show what you could expect from an interview at Churchill College, the University of Cambridge.
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21 thoughts on “Churchill Mock Interview – Linguistics”
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It would have been interesting to have had comments from the teachers afterwards.
Ahhh! The second part I just wanted to shout the answer! Is this part of the PPL program?
candidate:
CIA: hired
Those interviewers seem so lovely!
Hey! Just curious what level is this interview intended for? Like Bachelor or Master:)
Hi! May I ask if Churchill College interviews a significant number of linguistics undergraduate candidates every year?
This was amazing to watch.
Would this be considered a strong interview performance?
I liked this. Studied linguistics so fun to try and answer. He was very clever.
I've just paused it on the chatbox conversation. A quick thou(gh)t, the computer (my guess) mistakes the word pool (as in swimming) for the word pool (as in billiards). This would leave me to think that entity 2 is the computer, as it is unable to distinguish between the meaning of the word and the context of the sentence it's used in.
This was a strange experience, listening to how the candidate dealt with the questions. At the outset I think it was made clear that what the interviewers were searching for was the thought process of the candidate. That in itself is an interesting proposition. One can do a thought experiment on interviewing a musician – particularly an instrumentalist. What thought process does the intstumentalist bring to music ? I doubt if too many would be able to answer.
The first question the candidate was asked was essentially to compare and contrast [ that classic pedagogic question ] the different languages he had studied [ or possibly was simply aware of and of which his knowledge was superficial ]. In my opinion he failed to impress – he invoked a few obscure examples of some details of Hungarian [ a language bearing little resemblance to any other language you can name ]..
He might have mentioned polysyllabic languages with no stress [ Japanese ], and polysyllabic languages with stress [ Italian, Greek, English ], OR ones which rely on tones to convey meaning [ Mandarin] or polysyllabic which use tones possibly to indicate social status [ Urdu ]. And again, languages having complicated grammar [ German, Greek, Latin ] and those with different approaches to grammar [ Japanese, English ].
Carrying comparisons further – how musical do they sound ? Italian, Welsh definitely musical ; Spanish [ not at all musical ].
How dependent is a particular language dependent on clarity of diction ? English – very forgiving. French – pedantic to a fault
What about a language's readiness to admit foreign words. German – expunge the language of foreign imports and invent new words from old elements – a process which continues.
How does one explain the peculiar pronunciation of French which compared with the more robust Italian sounds as if the speaker has a speech impediment. Or the French stubborn retention of L'Academie Francaise as an arbiter of correctness.
The candidate conspicuously failed to answer the question about English spelling [ is this a concern for a student studying languages other than English ? ]. The idiosyncratic peculiarities of English spelling [ as opposed to US spelling ] arise in most cases as a result of importing different orthographic conventions [ ph from Gk ] and all the gh variants resulting from variants arising as a result of the Englishman's inability to pronounce the soft guttural [ Sottish loch ].
Towards the end of the interview neither myself nor the candidate understood what the red haired lady was asking. and it was painful to listen to the exchanges. Is this yet another example of how male and female minds operate ?
I was surprised by how much reliance was placed on comprehension of English. I realize that English teachers these days ignore accepted English grammar and syntax, which unlike say German, which retains four cases for nouns, relies on word order as a surrogate.
For me the absolutely key question for a modern language student is : why do you want to attend university to study modern languages ? Is it to get a job as an interpreter ? or are you interested more in classical literature of certain language groups ? – in which case we can help, but otherwise don't waste your and our time, and your money coming to university – go to a commercial language school.
The entire Cambridge approach would appear to be very different from that of Oxford, who actually admit that linguistics can be considered as a subset activity to code breaking. Or am I confusing Modern Languages and Linguistics ?
Suffix
He did very well until asked to think as a human does.
The job of an interviewer is to get the best out of an interviewee. Some interviewers see their job as intimidating and belittling.
undergrad interview and absolutely none of this is even touched on in comprehensive schools
Language proncition..
The ladies were very sweet and wanted to give him every opportunity to support his interview.
I want to be his Friend
Everyone in the room were rather inarticulate. Umm-ing and and ah-ing, rising inflection at the end of sentences when they weren't questions, using unnecessary jargon, and grinding my gears with constantly using 'yep' to signify agreement. The most laughable part was the comments on pronunciation from the obviously foreign interveiwers. I suppose they would call me incorrect because my accent is provincial. These people obviously have a poor grasp of idiom. I could go on…
If this were a real interview, would this performance be satisfactory?
i’m so impressed with his polish! he sounds like a native