Unpaid internships

[Barny]

In theory you can. No-one says "Oxbridge only, and the rest of you can bugger off." But it's interesting how the fast-track civil service jobs, the plum Foreign Office jobs, the merchant bank jobs, the fast-track corporate jobs, the plum academic jobs, go disproportionately to Oxbridge. I don't know the stats now but let me cite rough figures from the late '80s: Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) hired 200 grads in a give year in the late '80s ('87 I think). Half came from Oxbridge and the other half from all the other universities (about 40 at the time?). Two hundred applied from Oxbridge, all of whom automatically got a first interview. Half of these were offered positions. Of non-Oxbridge, about 3,000 applied all told, of whom 100 were accepted. The odds were massively in favor of Oxbridge: even chances from Oxbridge and 1 in 30 chance otherwise.

I went to a Russell Group school myself (KCL). But I won't kid myself that the quality of my education was anywhere remotely comparable to Cambridge (i.e., leaving aside the cachet of the name).

It's not the 80's anymore. Don't get me wrong, Oxbridge still has first dibs when it comes to interviews, but after that it's a level playing field. If you look at the intern books of front office BB these days, UCL is the most dominant, followed by LSE and Imperial and then Oxbridge.

I went to a Russell Group too (Nottingham) and then Cambridge, and I'd say that the quality of my education at Notts was actually better than at Cambridge. I learnt far more at Notts than Cambridge. There is so much exam technique at Cambridge - you only get 8 week terms and then have to take exams a month later. It's a race, and the only chance you have is to basically memorise and regurgitate most of the material, and you end up only understanding a few key concepts because the volume of material you have to learn is enormous. At Notts, I'd say I understood the vast majority of my lecture notes before going into an exam, even if we did cover a little bit less material than at Cam, and I think that's a far better thing IMO. Don't get me wrong, it's possible to understand the course deeply and memorise all the material too, but you'll need to be pulling 12-16 hours a day year-round to pull that off at Cam and I don't have the appetite for that personally. Usually you have to make a compromise - understand the material and not perform as well in the exam (because 70% of the exams are bookwork at Cam - at least for part III physics) or understand a bit less and just learn the bookwork like the back of your hand. Most I met did the latter.