My interview took place in early December. I was greeted by a student at the porter's lodge and taken to wait at the JCR. After a short wait talking to current students I entered my first interview with two college fellows. The interview lasted around half an hour. Later in the day I had my second interview which was very similar to the first but hosted by two new fellows of the college. Both interviews followed the same structure with the fellows giving me various maths questions and topics to explore and work through (no calculator). Some were new and others familiar with hints and suggestions were supplied by the fellows when you get into trouble.

The interviews covered a range of mathematics topics from coordinates to the Fibonacci sequence and even graph theory. Some of these were new and others familiar to me. At the time I was, as you would expect, very nervous and made many mistakes but managed to push through and do my best getting through as many of the problems as I could do. My first interview was quite successful, however, my second was much more shaky after making a simple mistake early on in the interview and lingering on the thought that I had already messed up.

The best preparation I had was STEP papers (STEP 1 is all that was really necessary for the interviews but more is always great). If you would like to do even more graph sketching, I would just sketch random made up functions, mixing polynomials, exponentials and trigonometric functions etc.

Make sure you prepare some questions to ask the fellows!