Oxbridge Preparation: Critical Skills

Course Overview

Intellectual skills are usually acquired through a slow process of absorption from a range of intellectual sources within a specific field, or set of cross-disciplinary fields. However, there are advanced principles which can be taught and selected from a range of intellectual and technical fields that can stimulate a candidate towards clearer thinking, better prose and verbal precision. This is a highly reflective course designed to familiarise a student with the key skills and issues of general intellection; of textual analysis and context, grammar and expression, and above all clarity of speech, be it on the page or in an interview. The aim of this course is to give a candidate a greater intellectual range so that they will not be stumped by the unfamiliar, having considered the actual process of intellection self-reflexively. This will place them far above many other candidates who might not have begun to consider the meta-thematic queries which surround any process of thought. This course seeks to give candidates a real opportunity to develop their intellectual voice through their own initiative. It is this which will impress an interviewer; as they examine a candidate, they are searching for evidence of hidden intellectual potential more than anything else.