Test taken: Sixth Term Examination Paper (STEP)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 5 hours
Length of interviews: 45 minutes
Online interview: No

I walked in and was greeted by both interviewers; following this, they gave a brief discussion about what the interview will be like and told me that we were going to do some problems. They let me know straight away that they wouldn't ask me anything on my personal statement. The first interview was mostly about sequences, I was asked to prove some properties about a given sequence. The last question completely stumped me, after trying to solve this for two minutes and ultimately failing, my interview was over; I thought I had messed up my chance of getting an offer.

My second interview went slightly better, although I still left believing that it had gone horribly wrong. My interviewers asked me to draw some graphs and calculate some properties of them. I originally made a careless mistake, but the interviewers quickly guided me back to the right track. Next we moved on to some kinematics.

For STEP I did all of the past papers from 1997 to 2018 for STEP II and III. I began by completing STEP I questions around November time, the STEP Support Programme was a large part of my studies between November and January. After January, I started completing STEP II and STEP III questions and by March I was completing past papers. It's all about practice to be honest, do as much maths as you can but make sure not to overwork yourself and  have fun whilst practising.

The night before the interview, I looked at my personal statement to see what kind of questions they could ask about it, however this was a complete waste of time because we focused all of our time on maths problems. I did do some past interview questions, which was probably the best use of my time as it put me in the correct mindset and made me think about different solutions that may work to certain problems. You can usually find Cambridge interview questions with a quick Google search and STEP questions are also a good place to start. Completing these questions definitely helped me to prepare for the actual interview questions, however the personal statement had no effect on my interview.

I would definitely advise current applicants to just think out loud and talk about their thought processes whilst completing questions; the interviewers will help steer you along the right path but only if they know what path you're on, so any thoughts or approaches you have you should just say out loud. Additionally, don't panic if you think it went horribly, as you've probably done much better than you realise and I think maths and science students tend to be more pessimistic about their performance. The interviewers are looking for someone who has a real passion for learning and can solve new situations with the same content you learn in A-Level, so just try different approaches that you already know about and talk about the approaches you're using.