Interview Format

I arrived the night before the interview and stayed in the student accommodation, most other students were doing this so I got to meet some people applying for my course along with people from other courses and some current 1st and 2nd years at the college. The interviews were in the morning, both lasting for about 25 minutes with an hour in between to talk to other applicants in the JCR.

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

We were told about a month before the interview that we would have 2 interviews, one general maths and one on a chapter of a book we were to read beforehand.

The first one I had was the general maths one which consisted of about 3 problems exploring various areas of maths, the general format being a reasonably simple question was asked and then made progressively harder, with the interviewers giving hintsif I was stuck. None of the questions required any knowledge further than the first year of A-level maths.

For the second interview I was given the choice of reading a chapter on complex numbers or integration, I chose to do complex numbers and the questions were mainly about applying them in different areas such as geometry. I had prepared beforehand for the interview by practicing problems from tests like the MAT and STEP and almost rehearsing answers to 'soft' questions such as "why maths?" and "why Cambridge?" but thankfully these were not needed, the only question I was asked other than maths was when they asked what was my name (remember you are applying for maths, not English).

How did you prepare?

"A Concise Introduction to Pure Mathematics" by Martin Liebeck gives a good consolidation of A-level maths and Further Maths along with excersises similar to what you would expect at interview.

Try to organise a couple of sessions with a teacherat school where you can talk over a problem or two. You may be able to find a few lists of supposedly past interview questions online. These can be a bit hit and miss, some are rediculously easy and some deceptively difficult, near impossible to tackle without the help of the interviewer, remember you aren't doing the interview in exam conditions.

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

Remember you are applying for maths, this means they are looking for mathematicians, people who (in general) are pretty lazy (there was one point in my interview when I was going to have to do a sizable amount of simple algebra to get the result and my interview just told me that it would work and we should move onto the next question), quite forgetful (you don't need to stress if you can't rember all your trig identities at a moments notice, the interviewers will remind you of the basic facts that would usually be in your formula book) and clumsy (everyone makes simple sign errors and the interviewers know you're going to be stressed so probably even prone to make mistakes, it's not going to ruin your application).

During the interview remember to say as much as you can, they want to see how you think. In one of my questions I gave a guess as to what I though the answer was and they lead me down the path of proving that my answer was correct by proving that getting closer to my guess improves the solution, if I hadn't said my intuition I wouldn't have had thought of it like that.