Engineering @ Sidney Sussex, Cambridge in 2022

Interview format

Engineering Admissions Assessment (ENGAA), 2x interviews

Interview content

Interview 1: motivation for studying course, technical question about personal statement then more technical questions Interview 2: questions/discussion about other areas of physics

Best preparation

Books of interview practice problems, practice interviews, going over personal statement

Test preparation

Practice ENGAA, NSAA and GCSE maths questions

Final thoughts

Think out loud as much as possible

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

Test taken: Engineering Admissions Assessment (ENGAA)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 2 hours
Length of interviews: 25 minutes each
Online interview: Yes

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

In my first interview, I was asked why I had applied for this course, and then a technical question about my personal statement. They then asked technical questions for the remaining twenty minutes, building on ideas from the A-level syllabus but asking questions beyond the scope of A-level. I found this interview really difficult, one of the interviewers was quite aggressive and I never managed to relax or get into the rhythm of it.

The second interview had about the same structure but the questions were taken from other areas of physics. It felt a lot more collaborative, like a discussion, but I'm not sure whether that just came from the experience of the interview before.

How did you prepare for your interviews?

I went through a few books of interview practice problems (I was actually asked two questions identical to ones in "Professor Povey's Perplexing Problems" in the interview) which seemed to really help and had practice interviews with my physics teacher. I also spent some time going back through my personal statement so I could answer questions on it, especially my EPQ.

If you took a test, how did you prepare?

All the ENGAA practice papers as well as the physical NSAA ones. Going through GCSE maths papers as quickly as possible without a calculator also helped too because the maths is about as difficult

What advice would you give to future applicants?

For any STEM subject, I think the most important thing is to think out loud as much as possible — there is no expectation that you'll be able to solve the problem without help, so you have to show the interviewers your thought process so they can let you know where you have gone wrong or where there's a gap in your knowledge.