Modern And Medieval Languages @ Gonville & Caius, Cambridge in 2019

Interview format

MML Admissions Assessment; 2x interviews.

Interview content

Interview 1: personal statement; Interview 2: discussion of unseen passage in target language.

Best preparation

Did mock interviews; read around the subject area.

Test preparation

Practised summarising short articles.

Final thoughts

Don't neglect your A-Levels; be confident.

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: MML written admissions test
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 2 hours
Length of interviews: 30 mins
Online interview: No

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

Mine were mostly personal statement based. For German I had a passage in German to analayse. Mostly, I just had interesting discussions about things I’d written about in my personal statement. 

How did you prepare for your interviews?

Weekly meetings with my German teacher one on one analysing passages of German literature and poetry in German was really helpful because they got us to do that (in English) in the interview. Also just getting in mock interviews with anyone you can - some of my mock interviews were a lot more scary than the actual thing and, as long as you don’t let that lower your confidence before, it really helped me feel happy in my actual interview.

Also, just reading anything related to your subject that you happen to find interesting - that way you can steer the conversation where you want it to go and it helps bring out your interests and love for the subject.

If you took a test, how did you prepare?

I used the practice papers online on the MML website, practised writing about English language because a lot is more related to that than anything else, used newspaper articles to do the questions on when I’d run out of practice papers - you only need a short-ish article with an argument to practise the test.

What advice would you give to future applicants?

Just be confident and focus on things that really get you excited. Don’t focus too much attention away from your A-levels at the same time because the Oxbridge application process can take up a lot of time but it’s important not to neglect your A-levels because those are what will matter by the summer