Test taken: Sixth Term Examination Paper (STEP), Mathematics Admission Test (MAT)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: About 3 minutes
Length of interviews: 25 minutes
Online interview: No

I had an applied and pure interview and it was just doing problems. In general at Cambridge I have heard of both 'themes' where the questions are all similar/build on each other and ones where questions are pretty much unrelated mostly. The problems weren't given on a sheet but said out to us which I think is the common format. I felt mostly calm before and during my interview as I had assured myself that there wasn't anything more I could do than focus as focusing is very important to make sure you don't make stupid mistakes - I'd done enough so I wouldn't regret not preparing.

The problems started easy to ease me into the interview. The atmosphere was more relaxed than I'd thought - the room looked more like part of a house with its sofa than an office at the top of New Court! It's hard to tell how you did on an interview so don't worry about how you did after it - some of my friends thought they did awfully but ended up getting in. People at the same college might have different questions too so it's hard to compare how many questions you got through etc. The common theme is that the personal statement isn't discussed much (almost everyone I know hasn't been asked) as they'd rather talk about their problems but someone was once asked about something on their personal statement so you need to make sure you know. 

I prepared for general questions like ‘Why do you like Maths?' I got asked it in both my interviews and was so thrown off the second time...but it turned out fine I guess. About my preparation, it was good as I'd done things on pretty much all the topics which came up. One of the questions was something I'd actually seen before! At the end of it all, don't worry about the interview and instead think of it as an opportunity to do some interesting maths with people who want to encourage you to think hard on new problems. Good luck for your interviews and I hope you have fun!

Do all the past papers/questions you can. Make sure you do some of the questions and topics you find hard, these are what might come up! Whether you want to do them as timed mocks or not is up to you. I generally preferred doing it because it let me have a lot of data on how I’m doing. Also it was pretty fun to use a normal distribution to estimate the probability of passing! For MAT, past papers is what I recommend. The ones from 2007 and onward reflect the current style better but if you want more then you can do papers from earlier but they're generally easier. 

Identifying the topic of the question means if you struggle on a certain question, you can go to the STEP database and search the topic to do harder questions on the same topic - if you can do STEP ones consistently, you can do MAT ones consistently too as STEP is harder. 

A good resource if you run out of MAT stuff is DrFrost Maths but I haven't ever used it, I've heard some people recommend it. For STEP, a lot of the advice about past papers carries over from MAT. Don't worry about starting preparation late, most people start after they got their offer in January though for interview preparation I recommend doing STEP 1 among other things.

The main thing I recommend regarding papers is to do applied questions, pretty much everyone I know who did STEP wishes they did applied earlier, Statistics in particular as those questions are generally like pure but with a probability skin on. Mechanics is harder to get used to at first but it will click over time. I recommend doing every paper as a timed mock to see how you're doing over time and if you're struggling on a topic, older papers and STEP 1 can give you easier questions on that topic. 

For picking questions, I recommend flicking through the questions and rating them out of 10 for how good you think they are. That means you don't have to keep rereading during the exam and once you do a lot of papers, you get a good idea of which topics are good for you so this generally takes 2 or 3 minutes by the end. My final advice for both is during the exam, make sure you stay calm even when you are struggling to get something out because these exams challenge you to think on a timer which is a scary experience. This is part of why mocks are good to get you used to that feeling. If you panic, you may start making mistakes so try to stay focused despite things going badly and you'll do better. Good luck for your exams!

Advice I got from others was to make sure to speak aloud about what you're thinking which allows the interviewers to assess you. Also, make sure you listen carefully to what the interviewers say. It's ok to be silent for a bit if you need to think and it's ok to get something wrong, the interviewers will help push you in the right direction to solve the problem. They want to see how you think so you won't be expected to get something wrong but instead have to stop and reason about the problems given. Olympiads are pretty good for problem solving skills especially for those earlier on in Year 12.