Asian And Middle Eastern Studies @ Clare, Cambridge in 2017

Interview format

Two 25 minute interviews with hour break

Interview content

Personal statement and language-based questions

Best preparation

Read around your subject and current affairs

Final thoughts

Don't worry if you haven't done AMES-related subjects before

Remember this advice isn't official. There is no guarantee it will reflect your experience because university applications can change between years. Check the official Cambridge and Oxford websites for more accurate information on this year's application format and the required tests.

Also, someone else's experience may not reflect your own. Most interviews are more like conversations than tests and like, any conversation, they are quite interactive.

Interview Format

I had two interviews in December, both in the faculty building because AMES is a tiny subject. My first interview was with both a college and visiting academic. The second was with two academics from the department. Both lasted about 25 minutes, and there was about an hour's gap between them.

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

The first interview was mainly based off what I'd written in my personal statement - those questions were quite open-ended. I was also given some verbs in a made-up language and asked to conjugate them. I was asked very similar kinds of questions in my second interview, although without the constructed language; instead, I was given a poem to annotate and discuss.

How did you prepare?

I read quite a lot about linguistics, and also Palestine, and then wrote about them in my personal statement. My school was also able to give me a mock interview, which was very helpful.

Looking back, what advice would you give to your past self?

Not many people do AMES, so although my (posh, private) school had a lot of Oxbridge applicants, literally nobody had ever done Arabic before. We had to guess what the interview would involve, but it ended up being mainly a "humanities" interview based off my personal statement rather like a classics or anthropology interview, with a side order of linguistic puzzles.