'Applying to Cambridge Law': Ms Elizabeth Langer (audio)

My name is Elizabeth Langer, I’m the Outreach and Widening Participation Coordinator for the Faculty, and I’m here to talk to you about some more kind of brass-tacks stuff about applying to Cambridge Law. So, here we have a very general outline of what it might look like if you do decide to apply and what that journey might look like for you, so you’d start out with something like choosing your course, which in my opinion maybe law would be the way to go, but maybe it’s not, maybe you choose something else. But first you’re going to choose your course and then as you move forward, you’ll kind of look towards choosing a college or maybe making an open application, I’m going to talk about all of these in much more depth by the way, this is just a broad overview of where we’ll be going on this journey. From there you’re going to see what you need to do to apply, you know, I want to go, and I want to study physics at Girton, what do I do from there?
After you’ve seen what you need to do, you’re going to work towards the overall application deadline. So, for most years it’s October 15th, but this year we’ve given you an extra 24 hours, so you can apply on October 16th, which is the deadline. From there you’re going to receive an additional little packet of things to fill out, which is due a week after the first deadline, if you have additional things that you need to submit you’ll go there, and then if you are invited to interview that’ll happen in December, and you’ll hear back in January. So, Mark has already touched on this pretty broadly, so I’m going to go through this, but here is the general subjects that you would be studying, so those are criminal law, law of tort, constitutional, land law, law of contract, Equity and European law, as well as lots of other little bits that you can pepper in to make the degree very much your own and to decide how you want to approach this. Do you want to really focus in on human rights or do you want to do lots of different half papers that might be something that really interests you? That would be offered on a year to year basis, so maybe something like tenant and landlord law if that’s something you’re really passionate about, you can very much the degree your own, which I think is something that is really wonderful about the Cambridge degree.
So, as Mark showed you, this is just another table to kind of touch on what he was talking about earlier, but this is roughly how you might divide up your degree. So, as you continue on you have more and more options and more and more different things that you can do to, again, make the degree your own. The way that it’s divided up, as Mark said, is through lectures, supervisions and self study, so the lectures you’re going to be in somewhere like here doing something like Findlay showed you, in a broad range of topics just kind of learning the same things that everybody else is learning so that you all are progressing together. And you also have your supervisions, which is going to be much more like what Janet was doing but on a much smaller scale, so it’s not going to be everybody, it’s just going to be a few people. And then you also have the opportunity to direct your study yourself through dissertations as well as fleshing out what you’ve learned in lectures and what you have talked about in supervisions.
So, once you have done a law degree, if you choose to do so, you’re going to look to the future because as we all know, it’s not just three years of doing a degree, you have to go somewhere from there. So, there are different options that you could take, you could qualify as a solicitor, which you don’t necessarily need to do a law degree for, although that could give you lots of really good opportunities and lots of good skills. To become a solicitor, you can do any undergraduate degree and then you would sit your SQEs, your solicitor qualifying exams as well as having a training contract. So, you can find out a lot more about that, more so than I’d be able to tell you, online. You could also qualify as a barrister, you do need to do a law degree for that one, but I think it’s a pretty good option to do a law degree, and then you would pass the bar course aptitude test and you would become a member of one of the Inns of Court and go from there.
Being a lawyer, being a solicitor, being a barrister isn’t the only thing that you can do, there are lots of options. Daniel runs our technology and our communications at the faculty, and he was originally qualified as a solicitor. You could do something like what I do, you could run outreach, you could also work in the Civil Service, you could work in finance, you could be a teacher or a consultant, you could go into academia like Findlay and Janet. So, there are numerous options, and law, as Mark said earlier, provides you a lot of really wonderful skills that are applicable in anything that you would want to be doing.
As it says, don’t take my word for it, I’m just a person standing in front of you, you can read a lot more about these things and about what law actually looks like on a day-to-day basis with things like the alternative prospectus, which is published by the Student Union. We have a blog, which is kept somewhat up to date, more up to date soon when I publish the blog pieces that I’ve been curating, which has a lot of takes on why somebody might choose to come to Cambridge, what a day in the life of a Cambridge student looks like studying law. People who have gone through a Cambridge law degree and came out the other side and what they think. We also have a lot of videos on our YouTube channel, in theory this will also be on the YouTube channel, so you can come back and see it then.
So, the next step was to choose a college. The college system can be somewhat confusing for people if you’re not familiar with it. So, this is just going to touch on it, give you a sense of what it’s all about before you start to look at what college you might want to choose. So, as it says, a college is like almost a mini university within the umbrella of Cambridge. The colleges are the ones that will be going over your applications and doing admissions for each course, and they’re also going to be the ones who are providing you care, support, all of them provide accommodation, and dining and recreation. So, they’re the ones who are putting on events for you, you might play sports for your college, they’re going to house you, they’re going to feed you, you go to formals at your college, and they’re also going to be the ones who are organising your supervisions for you, as well as providing things like libraries and study spaces. So, that is the smaller role of the college within the broader university who is organising lectures and practicals, seminars, that sort of thing, as well as giving you your examinations and marking your examinations, and eventually in theory awarding you a degree.
So, a little bit more about the colleges, there are 31 overall, three of them are mature colleges, that is Wolfson, St Edmund’s and Hughes Hall, two only admit women, so that’s Murray Edwards or Medwards and Newnham, which is just across the road over there, and there are 29 that would admit you as an undergraduate. So, like I said, all colleges provide the same baseline of things to help you live and grow and study, so that’s accommodation, food, support, IT support, a listening ear if you need it, a director of studies to help you out, tutors, that sort of thing, and also a little bit more less objective is the opportunity to make lifelong friends. So, no matter where you go, a lot of people ask, which is the most social college? Which college will help me to make friends and meet people? And the answer is any of them, but ultimately you do... well, you don’t have to, you can submit an open application, but a lot of you, if you were to apply, would be choosing a college, and ultimately there’s no right answer. Another question I get a lot is which is the best college for law? And that’s not really the way that you would want to go about this because every college will offer you law and every college will give you a really great shot at having a wonderful three years, having a great degree, but the places that they do differ are things that you might be interested in.
So, as you approach this you can ask yourself a number of questions like what do I value? Do I want a small college that has lots of green space and is traditional and has formal as often as possible? So, you can look into that and decide based on that, or do you want a really new college with lots of bricks, and you might say wow, Robinson is the one for me. So, who’s to say? As you go through it, you might look at where the accommodation is, what the accommodation is, cost of accommodation, what things look like, do you want a really aesthetic college? Or do you not really care, do you want one that’s in town or far out? Ultimately, it really is up to you guys what you value, and it could be something that is incredibly niche. So, a friend of mine, when she was choosing her college, she looked on the website and she saw that one of them had a picture of a snowman on the front page, and she was like that’s for me, I love it, and she applied, and she went there, and she had the best time ever. Maybe you say I want to play sports, so I want to be near a gym or the sports facility, or I want to row, so I want to be near the river, it really is up to you, and ultimately the only real way to approach this is based off of what you want. So, everybody will be happy somewhere; I have more or less yet to hear from anybody who doesn’t think that their college is the best college, which they can’t all be the best, but mine is.
So, ultimately, you can look at the alternative prospectus again to kind of see what people say are the up sides and the down sides of all the different colleges, or if you’re like I don’t know and I don’t really care, I just want to be doing a law degree because everything that Mark told me sounds so perfect, I’ll just put in an open application and that’s fine too. Like it says, the only reason that I might not recommend that is if you have mobility or access concerns, in which case you can reach out to the disability services, and they can give you some really good advice about how to approach that and what colleges might be able to cater to you.
Wonderful, so for the admissions side of things, we have a few things that we’re going to look at, so the academic requirements, the LNAT, your application and the interview. So, ultimately, Mark has kind of touched on this, but what we’re looking for is not the perfectly formed student who’s already done an entire law degree, knows the law by heart because you’re coming in to learn the law, you’re coming in to learn how to think like a lawyer, how to approach a legal career afterwards, we’re not looking for somebody who knows everything and is already perfect. What we are looking for is potential and interest. We’re looking to see that you’ve done well so far in your schooling and that you have the potential to take that further and to really succeed at university. We are also looking for people who really care about the law and who want to do it for... I don’t want to say the right reasons, but who do have a reason that you want to study law, it doesn’t need to be the perfect reason, but again just a reason that you’ve thought this through and that you know what you’re doing. We’re also looking for people who are a good fit to be lawyers, who have the aptitude for a legal degree, and that the course is the right one for you. We want to make sure that you guys are in a place to succeed and we’re choosing people who have the opportunity to succeed.
So, looking at that, in order to figure all of that out what we’re going to look at is your academic record, your personal statement, the reference that’s submitted on your behalf, if you have any written work that needs to be submitted, your performance in a written assessment, in this case the LNAT, and any contextual data, and if you’re interviewed we will look at the interview as well. So, our typical offer is A*AA at A level or 40-42 points in IB, so interesting things to note are that we don’t have any subject requirements, so you can come in with literally whatever you want to study. If that’s a really STEM heavy course load that’s really great, talk to us about why that is something that you wanted to do and how that’s going to benefit your legal studies. Or if that’s essays and the more traditional, you know, History, English route that’s great too. You can get a lot from both of those, and we would encourage you to talk about it. A lot of people wonder whether or not they should take law at A-level, and you’re welcome to do that, it won’t disadvantage your application, but equally, we’re not going to value it more highly than anything else just because we know that not everybody has access to a law A-level course. Similarly, the EPQ is a really great way to kind of flesh out your knowledge, to work on getting those research skills, but similarly, we know that not everybody has that opportunity, so it won’t impact your application one way or another. So, if you do want to do an EPQ more power to you, but it’s kind of a neutral space within your application.
So, what we do have for our pre-interview assessment is the LNAT, so the LNAT is the legal or the Law National Aptitude Test, and just because I know that some of you maybe aren’t 100 percent set on law these are other courses that also have pre-interview assessments, so I’ll just leave this up for a second before I change the slide. The important thing to note that for the LNAT it needs to be completed before you submit your application, so it needs to be done before (in this year) the 16th of October. So, a little bit about the LNAT, this year, this past year was the first year that we brought it back, you might have heard about the CLT, the Cambridge Law Test, which we had previously, which was taken on the day of your interview. The LNAT has replaced that, and there are some really good reasons why, it’s used by other universities including Oxford, and I think Bristol potentially and a few others, so about ten UK universities and a few international universities use this as one of the bases of their admissions process. It is going to test your verbal reasoning, your comprehension, your inductive and deductive reasoning and your analytical capabilities.
As you go into taking the LNAT, an important thing to note is that it’s not testing that you know everything about the law, you don’t need to have any legal knowledge as you go into it, it’s testing more your propensity for understanding legal ideas and how you kind of approach the law, whether you have, again, an aptitude as the name says, for the subject. So, it’s again not a test of your intelligence, it’s not a test of your legal knowledge, it’s just a test of whether or not law might be the right thing for you. It’s in two sections, there’s a multiple-choice section, which is largely looking at passages and then answering questions about those, and then there is an essay section, so you’re going to look at... you’re going to have about 40 minutes to write an essay responding to a prompt. So, it’s over the course of two hours and 15 minutes, and some important things to note are that there is a cost of £75 to take it in the UK or the EU, but definitely look online because there are bursaries that are available because we understand that that’s not something that everybody can easily afford. Yes?
Participant: I want to ask, how do Cambridge weight the LNAT, is everything considered equally, or do they not look at certain parts?
I’m going to have a quick Q and A session at the end, and I’ll answer that first, is that all right if I just go through this? Because that is a really good question. Again, so the question was, how we weight the LNAT. Yes, anyway, just really quickly, if you want any more information the practice tests, which are a great option to help you do well in the LNAT, you can look online on lnat.ac.uk. So, for the UCAS application there is the personal statement, and the most important thing as you go into that is to just, you know, you know yourself, you know why you’re applying, you know what the basis of your application is, so go in, be honest, write with integrity, and talk about why you’ve done what you’ve done, what it’s done to prepare you for your law degree that you want to undertake as well as other things that you’ve done that will show that you are dedicated to doing law, that it’s something that interests you and also why it interests you.
So, you can talk about lots of different super curriculars, which is what we call them here, which are things that you’ve done outside of your formal education that may benefit your application. So, those are things like have you read the books that Mark talked about earlier? Have you been following legal issues in the news? Have you been looking at the cases that Janet was talking about? Have you listened to podcasts or been reading blogs? Mark Elliott has a great blog that you could look at if you wanted to, you know, have you gone out of your way to attend court? Have you done online courses like... I’m just going to really flog this one, but the Future Learn Exploring Law course, which is starting on the 17th of July if you guys want to do that. So, have you looked at all these thing?
A really great resource is Higher Education Plus, which can give you some great jumping off points if you’re not sure where to start with a super curricular engagement. So, you’re going to want to kind of talk about that, talk about why you want to do law and how you’ve shown that you want to do law. You can also talk about things that aren’t necessarily relevant, so you know, are you an international judo world medallist, and does that show that you have a really great ability to balance commitments, that you’re great at time management? So, you can show those as evidence of other things, but it doesn’t really have as much of a weight, and it won’t be taken into account in the same way. So, definitely check out as well our blog for more information about how to approach writing these. There’s also the SAQ, which I’ve talked about briefly earlier, which is just going to kind of give us a little bit more background about you, so things like what you did in A-levels, and there’s also an optional, additional personal statement, which shouldn’t be the same as the first one that you submitted, but you’re not going to be penalised if you don’t do that, so that’s for you to choose what to do. And this doesn’t need to all be done in one sitting; you can come back to it as long as you get it in by the date.
So, the final component if you’re invited is the interview, so this is something that a lot of people do stress about, but I would invite you as much as you can, obviously this is me telling water over a fire not to boil, but don’t stress, it’s really not that bad. As you approach it there are some things to consider, so each college interviews you individually, and they will do it based off of their own internal interviewing system, so some colleges will have shorter, longer interviews, some will have more or less between one and three generally, no more than three, and these are going to be conducted by people who are really familiar with the area, so often times lecturers at the colleges. And so, they’re going to be focused a lot on academic and subject focussed things, but again, you don’t need to know the basis of the English legal system in order to do well.
Overall, it’s the same things we were talking about earlier that we’re looking for, we’re looking for are you interested, and do you have potential in the field? Do you actually really care about doing law and why do you care about it? Are you able to engage with these complex concepts that might be brought up? A lot of people have described Cambridge interviews as like mini supervisions, so it’s like the same things that you were doing with Janet earlier of how you approach and think about concepts, and are you open to new ideas? Can you think things through and verbalise how you’re thinking them through? The most important things are, as this says, to be yourself, to think about current events, and to look back at your application, what you’ve said.
So, the bulk of our interviews at the moment are still held online, but this upcoming year is the first year that a number of colleges are coming back to in-person interviews. The ones that are going to be interviewing in-person are Gonville and Caius, King’s, Pembroke, Peterhouse, Selwyn and Trinity. If you are applying to any of those colleges and you are interviewing in-person, they’ll send you very detailed information about what to do, where to be, when to be there, so they will be very, very clear about what to do, but for the online ones, which you will also receive information about, the most important things are to make sure that you’re in a place where you have stable internet connection, where you can kind of focus on the interview where it’s suitably quiet, and that you’re able to really give yourself the best shot possible for the interview. A few things to note are just as you go into it, be yourself, wear what you feel comfortable in, you don’t need to wear a three-piece suit or an evening gown if that’s not what you wear on a day-to-day basis. Just go into it with the knowledge that you’ve done everything you can to prepare yourself and you’re going to do great.
Wonderful, and so finally, in January comes the decision. There’s essentially two ways that it could go, you may be made an offer, and so that could be to the college that you applied to, or you could be pooled to a different college, which is a process that makes it a lot more fair in terms of how you apply. So, a lot of colleges may receive a really high number of applications and other colleges may receive many fewer, but all of them will have a certain number of places that they have to fill and that they’re looking for the best possible applications for those. So, if college A receives 200 applications for 15 spots, and then they say, oh man, I’ve got 14 other applicants that in any other year I would have loved to have, and then they’ll say hey guys, hey college B who received 30 applications for eight spots, but only filled four of them, I’ve got these 14 applicants and they’re really great, I would have loved to admit them. And college B will say, oh hey, I love four of those and I’ll take them to fill up my pool. Then college C will say I actually needed two applicants too, and so they’ll take from there as well. So, if you apply, don’t worry necessarily about the college that you’re applying to, again, apply based off of instinct and fit, apply more so with the knowledge that you may be pooled, you may not go to the college that you immediately applied to, but that’s fine.
So, your offer could be conditional or unconditional, and so they’ll set conditions that you would need to meet in order to be able to attend. The other option is that you may be unsuccessful in applying, but please do not let that deter you, there’s only one way to know and that’s to apply, and there’s lots of people who didn’t think that they would make it in, they said, you know what, I’m just going to throw this application at the wall and see if it sticks, and now they’re however many years into their degree, having a great time, or I hope having a great time. So, you never know what’s going to happen, and we can only offer you a place if you do apply. So, here’s some really great resources, such as our website, the Exploring Law course, and my email. There’s also a really great resource called Inside Uni, which give you examples of different interview questions for all of the different colleges and all of the different courses. I would absolutely recommend it, it’s really wonderful and so it gives you a sense of what you might be going into. So, yes, if you have any questions at all that aren’t answered today, please feel free to email me at outreach@law.cam.ac.uk and I would love to answer them. Thank you, guys.