Test taken: English Literature Admissions Test (ELAT)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: Around an hour
Length of interviews: Half an hour
Online interview: No

In the first interview, I was taken into a quiet study room 10 or 15 minutes before the interview, and given a piece of paper with several poems on it. I read through them, annotated them and took notes about the thoughts and ideas I had.

After that, I went into the interview room, and sat with my interviewer. She asked me what I thought about the poems, and I gave her answers. Actually, I phrased everything as a question because I was nervous, and because that is how I think. I just articulated everything I was thinking, which I think was probably the right sort of approach. We chatted, and then at the end I used the time for questions to ask what kinds of teaching you get at Cambridge (weekly supervisions in pairs where you discuss your essays, small-group classes and seminars, and optional lectures). My first interviewer was really lovely and put me at my ease, and I gradually relaxed and felt quite comfortable.

The second interview was at a house on a different part of the college property, a little way from the central college. A student helper walked me over, and then I waited outside the interview room on a chair for what felt like quite a long time - the interview was taking place in a building notorious for being strange, which didn't really help. I had been quite relaxed before but I became increasingly nervous.

This interview was more general - I was asked to justify why my subject was important, which I sort of faltered over. My interviewer was nice (I have since discovered her to be one of the loveliest people I know) but quite incisive, and I found her a bit frightening! I was asked questions about my personal statement - in my case a particular line where I talked about translation was picked out, and my interviewer asked me lots of questions about that topic, pushing me towards more abstract thinking about how you interact with language, the value of literature, and how meaning is made, how it exists in texts and is understood in reading. It got more and more abstract, which I found quite difficult to deal with!

My interviewer mentioned at the end that she had wanted to ask me questions about the essays I had submitted with my application, but we had run out of time.

I didn't feel at all confident about the outcome of that interview. (It really didn't help that I had to find my way back across to the main college site on my own!) However, in spite of how awful it felt like it went at the time, I still got an offer, so I'd encourage people not to take negative experiences to heart. (My interviewer herself had a horrible interview when she applied to Cambridge, and now she's conducting interviews!)

I had a couple of practice interviews with teachers from school - these weren't super helpful, although they stopped me being quite as frightened of the interviewers.

Practising talking about my subject and the bits of it I was particularly passionate about (in my case, some writers I thought were overlooked), was the most helpful bit. I also practised that on my family members, although I don't think they appreciated it much! They did tell me to speak slower, which I think is generally good advice, and my mother (who had done history at Murray Edwards college) told me about her interview, and said that the important thing to try to do was to show the interviewers how you think, and to think through what they asked you out loud. Vocalising my thinking was definitely the best advice I got!

I also reread my personal statement, and the essays I had sent to the college as part of the application process, and thought about what I'd written there and what my ideas about them were. That was really useful, as those things were asked about in my second interview.

I started preparing about a fortnight before the exam. I looked at past papers (which you can find on the ELAT website) and practised taking them. Even though half the papers are redacted for copyright reasons (they take out the more recent texts), there was enough there to get a feel for what the questions looked like, and to practise scrutinising (close-reading) the texts, picking out interesting things together, and laying them next to other interesting bits from the other passages. Nobody marked my practices, but I was able to see examiner's reports for previous years, and a few example scripts, which I got some ideas of what to do (and what not to do!) from. All this was free on the ELAT website at the time. It's a lot like an unseen exam is an English literature A Level, so if you're asking teachers to help you prepare or help mark your scripts, that's what you want them to have in mind. There are also some helpful resources for practical criticism on the English faculty's website, which I didn't use at the time but would be helpful (the ELAT is basically prep for practical criticism).

The important thing, I think, is to remember that interviewers don't expect or even want you to have all the answers. They aren't there to test your knowledge. What they want to ascertain, it seems to me, is the way that you think, so articulating what you're thinking is a good idea.

Also, feel free to take your time to think about questions before you pose an answer. Breathe, and slow down, and give yourself space. Your interviewers know that it's difficult and they know you need space to think round the big ideas they're posing to you - and if they see you struggling, they'll try to help!

Taking time to think before you speak doesn't make you weak, and silence in these situations isn't a bad thing - they want to know that you think about your arguments! (It's taken me several years at university to realise this; I don't think I really got it until a supervisor in second year - who had terrified me at interview - suggested I think through my ideas before I speak.)

The interviewer isn't out to get you, and when they ask seemingly horrible questions, they just want to know how you respond to being asked to think about things from new angles. Give it a go, and remember it's an interview, but it's also a discussion; they do want to know what you think!