Maths @ Christ's, Cambridge in 2017

Interview format

1x test (1hr); 2x interviews (45mins-1hr)

Interview content

1st interview: focussed on test; 2nd interview: graph sketching & other areas

Best preparation

Interview questions took a familiar format

Final thoughts

Don't overanalyse afterwards; do as much as possible to get help with STEP

Remember this advice isn't official. There is no guarantee it will reflect your experience because university applications can change between years. Check the official Cambridge and Oxford websites for more accurate information on this year's application format and the required tests.

Also, someone else's experience may not reflect your own. Most interviews are more like conversations than tests and like, any conversation, they are quite interactive.

Interview Format

I had a pre-interview test in the morning which lasted about an hour and a half.

I then took all of my working to my first interview and gave it to the interviewers. There were two interviewers but just one of them did most of the speaking. I think this one lasted about an hour.

I then had an interviewer with the Director of Studies of Maths which lasted about 45 minutes to an hour. I stayed the night before in college and got breakfast in the upper hall. In between my interviews I waited in the TV room with a lot of the other applicants and also some students who escorted groups of people to their interviews.

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

The test involved both long & short questions. From what I can remember, the questions were mainly pure maths I was familiar with from school, along with a probability question. I don't think there were any mechanics questions.

The first interview was focused on the test but mainly on the longer questions I selected but didn't get quite right. In the second interview I was asked to sketch some graphs, do some integration, differentiation and finished with a mechanics question.

How did you prepare?

I had a mock interview organised by my school which wasn't actually very helpful. The questions I was actually asked were all familiarly formatted questions - by which I mean I didn't get any open-ended questions. The pre-interview test was quite similar to the UK Maths Challenge questions so they were good prep. It also helped to specifically practise graph-drawing as I hadn't done much of that in school.

Looking back, what advice would you give to your past self?

Don't try and analyse how things went afterwards. You just can't know.

For me, I think the interviews themselves seemed pretty accessible. However, the hard part was passing the STEP exam in the summer. I go to a grammar school which regularly has a few students going to Oxbridge each year. Even my school didn't offer me any help with STEP aside from pointing me to a weekly two-hour STEP help session in Leeds (I think organised by the Further Maths Support Programme [Editor's Note: This is now called the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme, and it is a free maths support programme for state school pupils]).

I was in a very fortunate position of knowing a maths professor who could mark and review past STEP papers I did for him.