I arrived late in the evening and the porters gave me a map. I spent the evening in a bar talking to some people about interviews. We went to bed pretty late.

I had the TSA at 9am but had no idea where to go. Getting there was quite a rush and I didn’t make it with much time to spare.

I had three interviews: a general interview and two technical interviews. The general interview was just a fact check of my personal statement with a non-engineering interviewer. The next two interviews (2 interviewers each) were a maths interview and physics interview.

I hadn’t prepared at all for the TSA (read: I had never looked at one) and didn’t know what to do.

The maths interviewers were very friendly. I had no idea what I was saying but they smiled a lot and didn’t make me feel like an idiot. We discussed how to find the average of a cos graph but I didn’t understand what the interviewer was asking until the end of the interview.

All the interviews were quite calm. The previous candidate came out of his physics interview and told me it was about the coefficient of restitution. That psyched me out because I had never covered that before but it didn’t come up in my interview. I just remember being told about a household object and estimating it's power.

I spoke to my dad about his Oxford physics interviews and he described what they did. He described it as a conversation not a test which is completely true.

My school did an assembly where a teacher interview a girl infront of the whole school. To be honest I didn’t think that was that useful.

A-level maths and physics questions were useful. They also expected you to use your imagination because we covered some topics that were new to me like simple harmonic motion.

Actually prepare. When you’re choosing a college look at the requirements – had I known there was a test I might have picked another college.