Geography @ Sidney Sussex, Cambridge in 2016

Interview format

2 interviews with 2 interviewers. Given unseen text before first interview.

Interview content

First interview about the unseen text. Second interview was more general. Content was harder than school materials.

Best preparation

Reading news / Economist articles. Unseen text was from Economist. Mock interviews with teachers.

Final thoughts

Waiting was scarier than the interview. The interviewers were really friendly.

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 had two interviews in the morning. The first was based on a text that I was given 15 minutes before the interview. This interview had two interviewers - one was the DoS for geography and the other was a fellow of another subject. The second interview was more general. Again there were two interviewers - one was the dean of the college and the other was a geography fellow from another college.

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

I was given some pre-reading material on East and West Africa. I was also asked questions looking at unlabelled world maps. It felt hard and the material was very different to material that I had studied in school.

How did you prepare?

Reading news articles and Economist articles prior really helped. The unseen text I was given was from an old issue of the Economist. I also found practice interviews

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

The actual interview was way less nervewracking than the waiting before it. The interviewers were really friendly. I think that being as relaxed as possible helps so much as it lets you think properly in the interview. Also it’s important to remember that they wouldn’t have asked you to interview if they didn’t already think you were capable of getting in.