Engineering Admissions Assessment (ENGAA), Sixth Term Examination Paper (STEP); 2x interviews
Interview 1: general interests, graph sketching; Interview 2: personal statement, technical questions
Did extra reading based around topics mentioned in personal statement
Practise questions from similar papers
Try to come across as enthusiastic and interested
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.
Test taken:
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 2 hours
Length of interviews: 25 mins
Online interview: No
In my first interview I wasn’t asked anything about my personal statement, more just about my interest in the subject and how I learn. These were pretty easy to answer and didn’t require too much thought, this calmed me down a bit. Then I was asked to draw some graphs. At some point I made some small mistakes/ said some silly things, but the interviewers were really nice about it and just corrected me.
In my second interview I was asked some personal statement questions and then asked a materials question. I was really stuck at the start, but the interviewer gave me a nudge and that helped things along.
I went over my personal statement and made sure I was comfortable with every part of it (I watched videos and printed out articles on subjects I had spoken about.) I also did some general reading and watching of videos related to engineering. For the academic side of the interview, I made sure I was comfortable with all my A Level subjects and did extra work on my weaknesses. I also did all the problems on the ‘I want to study engineering’ website. Finally I had a look at the InsideUni website myself.
For the ENGAA, I did all the ENGAA papers. I also did papers with some similar questions e.g
The key advice I would give is to come across enthusiastic and interested. This is pretty much the only thing about the interview that you can completely control, and I really think it’s an important quality the interviewer is looking for. I would also advise you to ensure that you can speak in more depth on subjects that you’ve covered in your personal statement, this means if you’re asked about your personal statement, you don’t just end up regurgitating it. This is something I struggled a small bit with.