History @ Jesus, Cambridge in 2019

Interview format

History Admissions Assessment (HAA), Arts-Humanities Admissions Assessment (AHAA), 2x interviews

Interview content

Interview 1: discussion of a secondary source, including a picture Interview 2: general questions, including on historiography

Best preparation

Practice interview, wider-reading, reviewing personal statement and A-level content, practice looking at primary sources and talking about subject

Test preparation

Practice papers

Final thoughts

Speak all your thought processes aloud, and try and take a stab at every question,

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: History Admissions Assessment (HAA) and the Arts-Humanities Admissions Assessment (AHAA)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: c. 2 hours
Length of interviews: c. 30 mins
Online interview: No

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

I had two interviews - one with a secondary source to read and one just general interview that asked general questions that largely tried to get you to think about historiography specifically, and how history as a discipline actually works. I eventually relaxed into both of them, although I did realise halfway through my interview that I had reading for that I hadn't noticed there was also a picture (I had assumed it was just a cover photo for the article) and had to on the spot come up with thoughts about it. One thing that I wasn't quite ready for was that all the practice I had done regarding the reading portion of the interview was on short primary sources, and I got given a decently-sized secondary source, which is very different.

How did you prepare for your interviews?

Did a practice interview at my sixth form college which was nothing like the real thing, read an extra book (that wasn't on my personal statement) that I didn't talk about, skimmed the books I had talked about in my personal statement (I had already read them though) and skimmed my A-level notes (also didn't talk about them). We also had a few sessions at my college where we went over some primary sources and discussed them, and had a go at presenting a PowerPoint on something we were interested in to the whole group.

If you took a test, how did you prepare?

I had teachers tell me what the history portion of the test was like, we did maybe one or two practices in class, and then I did one AHAA practice paper in my own time

What advice would you give to future applicants?

Just treat it like a conversation, because that's essentially what it is. Speak all your thought processes aloud, and try and take a stab at every question, but also don't pretend like you know something you don't - the interviewer would rather see your thought process in trying to get towards an answer (and maybe let them know before you start answering that you're a bit unsure) than you saying something wrong or misguided because you pretended you knew what you were talking about.

Also, you don't need to answer questions straight away - even in supervisions now, I will sometimes ask my supervisors to repeat a question (you can also definitely ask that, and ask them to reword the question too) and spend some seconds in silence trying to work out what my response will be - this is fine to do. The interviewers aren't trying to trick you or trip you up, they just want to see how you think, and will help you as best they can if you get a bit stuck or freak out and forget how to think.