I signed in next to the Porters’ Lodge and as I was a little early to collect my reading material, there was time for a student volunteer to show me the parts of college which I would need to go to for the rest of the day. After that, I collected some reading materials from where I had signed in earlier and took them to the library to read them and make some notes. After about 55 minutes, I went to wait outside the room where my first interview was. It was a largely history-based interview, with two history academics and that lasted for about 40 minutes. I had a few hours between finishing my first interview and starting my second so I went out of Trinity to get some lunch with my Dad, who had come with me to Cambridge for the day. After lunch I had my second interview which was largely politics based and with one politics professor. That lasted about 30 or 40 minutes as well.

At the time, I thought my History interview had gone really well. We started off my talking about my EPQ, which one of the interviewers was really interested by. We then moved on to talking about the reading material. The first few questions had been indicated as likely questions at the top of the reading material so I had some notes on them. Then we built up to some harder questions which involved interpreting specific sentences in the text, so I really took some time with those, reading the sentences out loud and asking the interviewers to define a word at one point when I got a bit stuck. The last part of that interview involved me being presented with a list of about 8 words related to broad historical concepts. I was then asked to choose 3 and define them accurately yet succinctly.

In my second interview, I found my interviewer a lot harder to read so it was hard to tell how it had gone. We talked about a book from my personal statement- ‘Wild Swans’, and whether the structure of it changed the way it should be read. The professor also gave me a choice of two topics which he didn’t expect me to know anything about- I chose the option related to legal courts, and he then alternated between giving me some limited information about it, and asking for my reaction. Each time he added a new piece of information, he would ask me to if I’d changed my mind about what I’d said before and why, or if I wanted to defend the opinion I had stated before. Finally, he asked me about one of the essays Inhad submitted before the interview- on select committees.

Chatting with my Dad about politics and current affairs, which I did anyway, even when the interview was not looming, probably gave me the best practice at articulating my thoughts about political issues. I also had some lovely history teachers who gave me a second practice interview when my first one went terribly and although they weren’t really sure what a Cambridge history interview is like, so it wasn’t very similar to the real thing, it was good practice of answering tricky questions under pressure.

Thank you to the organisers of this project (who have done a wonderful job!)