Engineering @ Sidney Sussex, Cambridge in 2016

Interview format

2x interviews (1 with 30 mins preparation time)

Interview content

First interview: interests and hobbies; Second interview: answering questions from prepared article, working through as open discussion.

Best preparation

Work experience and graph sketching

Final thoughts

Explain your thinking and ask questions; they want to see how you work

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 arrived and had 30 minutes to read an article. I then had to answer 3 questions that came with the article before my interviews.

First interview was a general one, with one interviewer, about why I wanted to do engineering as well as my personal interests and hobbies.

Second interview was discussing the article and some maths questions, with 2 supervisors.

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

At first I was nervous as I couldn’t complete any of the questions set in the article, although I had made a good attempt at all three. Second interview was spent working through the questions to completion. They asked me to explain my thinking for what I had answered, and we then worked through the rest of the questions as an open discussion, providing small points to help when I got stuck. Asked to talk about my work experience and explain a part of it in detail. Then ended with maths questions.

How did you prepare?

Work experience. This allowed me to find my passion for engineering, so I was driven to studying the subject. Also did some practice with graph sketching.

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

The interviews are styled like a supervision (small group teaching at Cambridge). Always explain your thinking and don’t be afraid to ask questions. The interviewers will be your supervisors for the duration of your course.

They want to see how they feel working with you etc