Test taken: History Admissions Assessment (HAA)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: Approx. 2 hours
Length of interviews: 20-25 minutes 
Online interview: Yes

In my first interview, the first half was spent asking me about my personal statement, and in the second half I was given a primary source to look at and offer some thought on. There were two interviewers, one of which asked questions in one half and the other in the other half. When discussing my personal statement, they basically worked through it chronologically asking me questions about everything that I'd mentioned, excluding the extracurriculars. In the second half, the main difficulty was the complexity of the language of the source - I was given 5 minutes to read through it and understand, and after that I was essentially asked some reading comprehension questions about it.

Both the interviewers seemed very nice and friendly, but for some reason their set-up was a bit odd - they were sat in one room at a desk together quite a way away from the camera with a window behind them, so all I could see of them were a pair of slightly ominous silhouettes! I felt a bit self-conscious about the fact that my face was probably being projected onto a wall, but apart from that things went fairly smoothly.

In my second interview, I was asked about my written work in the first half, and then asked some 'philosophical' questions about History in the second half. I slightly messed up my answer to the first question I was asked, but other than that I was surprised how surface-level a lot of the questions were - they were fairly similar to everything I'd been rehearsing, thankfully! I found the second half of the interview more difficult and I worried that I might have been a bit blunt in my answers, but clearly, it didn't go too badly in the end! If I hadn't practised answering that style of question beforehand, I don't think I would have done very well at all in that bit of the interview. With regard to the atmosphere, it was very similar to the first interview with the dubious tech set-up, but the interviewers again seemed nice people.

The best possible thing to do is definitely practice interviews - I did mine with my History teacher mainly, but I also did one with another one of the History teachers at my school. Doing all of the practice gives you the opportunity to get used to forming your thoughts verbally as opposed to just writing them down as you would do in an exam! In private, I also practiced interview questions by talking to myself in private, often recording what I'd said and listening back to it later on. To make my practice more efficient, I made a spreadsheet in which I categorised all of the interview questions I came across into rough skillsets (e.g. 'Nature of Sources'; 'History of History'; 'Viewpoints & Biases'; 'Deep Thoughts about history') to help give some structure to my work. I felt a little insane doing it, but it gave me a chance to consolidate the learning I'd done in my in-person practice interviews with my teacher.

From there, it is very important to revise your Personal Statement and any written work that you submitted, as in my case they asked quite a lot of questions about both! When I was looking at my Personal Statement, I printed it off and annotated it with any possible interview-style question I could think of and came up with some rough answers. I did the same thing with my written work, but also made sure to revise the subject areas I discussed in my essays. Likewise, I re-read some sections of what I'd mentioned on my personal statement and made a few notes to ensure that all of the content was fresh in my mind. Friends can also be super helpful when it comes to interview prep! At lunch they'd sometimes throw interview questions they'd made up at me or come up with some based off of my personal statement. While the questions they asked varied in relevancy, it still gave me a bit of a chance to keep practicing talking through my answers. Getting a friend or family member to test you on some questions you'd prepared could definitely be another option if your teacher isn't being particularly helpful.

Practice papers! They were super helpful in allowing me to know exactly what the paper would look like, and my History teacher was able to try and offer me some rough feedback after I did them. If I remember correctly, I found the practice papers on the Course Page under Entry Requirements. Source skills are generally quite important to practice as well ahead of the test, so I also looked at some of the practice papers for the Oxford History Admissions Test to get a feel for working with sources that were a bit more complicated than what I'd look at at A-Level.

Before doing the assessment, it's a good idea to see if you can find a syllabus or mark scheme or something along those lines that will tell you what you need to try and do for the assessment. Again, I think I ended up looking at the marking criteria for Oxford as well since they seemed to be testing fairly similar skills.

Remember that the interviewers are interested in your thought process above everything - it doesn't matter too much what your conclusion is, they just to see you actually thinking! Take time to pause before jumping in, consider 'for' and 'against' for every question out loud, and then come up with your answer at the end.