Modern And Medieval Languages @ Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 2018

Interview format

MML Admissions Assessment; 2x interviews.

Interview content

Interview 1: personal statement; grammar problem solving. Interview 2: discussion of unseen passage; personal statement.

Best preparation

Mock interviews; review personal statement.

Test preparation

Practice papers.

Final thoughts

Practice articulating your thoughts aloud.

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

Test taken: Modern Languages Admissions Test
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 30 minutes
Length of interviews: 30 minutes
Online interview: No

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

For my Spanish interview we mostly discussed points from my personal statement, especially my analysis of Hispanic film, and then moved on to some grammatical exercises where they asked me for a verb conjugated in a specific tense/person, and vice versa with a few tougher grammatical forms I wasn't so sure of (they asked me what form "obtengámonos" was, and I could only use Dora the Explorer for reference). We also spoke in Spanish for a bit, but I was so nervous I stuttered the whole time.

In Russian (ab initio) it was much less focused on Russian itself. They had given me a text that was a mix of poetry and prose about Brexit and asked me my thoughts on it. We discussed a line that referenced line dancing, and when I admitted that I didn't really know much about it they told they didn't either. They then moved on to asking me questions about my perdonal statement, and tested my knowledge on a specific point I'd made. In terms of atmosphere I remember they were so nice to me that I was paranoid and suspicious. They were kind, and very encouraging. I thought I'd already made a mistake and they were just being nice out of pity.

How did you prepare for your interviews?

I practised a little with friends, and at an Oxbridge workshop for local state schools; we would ask each other questions about our thought processes - why do you think that, so would you agree that, what about etc. I also revised all the texts/topics I'd mentioned in my personal statement. I made a mindmap trying to conceptually link related texts together (so I could more confidently talk about multiple texts at once) and also revised a few concrete examples - I remember memorising some specific prefixes from Russian for a point.

If you took a test, how did you prepare?

I wrote answers to past papers given on the MML website, and revised rhetorical techniques and discourse markers in my target language. I was doing an English Language A Level, the exams of which are similar to the MLAT, so my revision was mostly just to fill in the gaps in my literature analysis knowledge.

What advice would you give to future applicants?

Maybe just know every inch of your personal statement inside out and make sure you narrate your thought processes - don't try to immediately get it right, explain how you arrive at your answers.