My interview was in December. I stayed at the college as I had come from Switzerland. I had two interviews and a one-hour written assessment. The interviews must have been around half an hour each but I can't remember the exact length. The first interview was with one interviewer and the second one with two. In between the interviews I stayed in a room and got to know other applicants. I brought stationary but all I needed was a pen.

We spoke a bit about my interest in linguistics at Cambridge to begin with, Then I had to compare an unknown language to English based on a few example sentences with the gloss underneath. This was really fun and I had a lot to say.

Then I was asked some questions about phonology which I know a lot less about, but I more or less worked out what to say and the interviewers were helpful, they prompted me, they don't try to confuse you! I was also asked questions about ambiguities in English sentences and looked at relationships between first and second languages.

I was nervous before the interviews, but they were honestly so fun that I got over this quite quickly, and the interviewers really weren't scary. I think it's definitely normal to find at least some parts of the interviews difficult, it's not expected to know all the answers!

I had read multiple linguistics books during the previous year, including The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, How Language Works by David Crystal and The Power of Babel by John McWhorter. My school in Switzerland didn't organise anything, I went to an open day though after applying. To be quite honest, I barely did any preparation for the actual interview... I think I just looked through the information the college sent me and did a few of the practise tests you can find on the Cambridge website.

I'm still not sure if I was supposed to have done more, but honestly the interviews were much more about your ability to think and process new material than about showing of any previous knowledge, so I think specific preparation isn't anything to agonise about! I read lots of linguistics books simply because I found them interesting, I wasn't actually thinking about it as preparation.

If you get an interview, have fun! It's an amazing experience to talk with people who are very knowledgeable in a field you as interested in, whatever the outcome!