Modern And Medieval Languages @ Christ's, Cambridge in 2019

Interview format

2x interviews.

Interview content

Interview 1: discussion of unseen poem, personal statement; Interview 2: unseen text, personal statement

Best preparation

Read around as much as possible.

Final thoughts

Try not to stress too much!

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: None
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 3-4 hours
Length of interviews: 30 mins
Online interview: No

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

For each of my interviews I was asked to read a poem beforehand and we discussed that for about 10 minutes.

Another 10-15 minutes was discussing the texts I mentioned in my personal statement (we discussed the poem in Spanish, and we discussed my texts in French). For Spanish, they were pretty uninterested in the texts I had mentioned in my personal statement and asked what else I had read - make sure you read something outside of your personal statement and school curriculum! The atmosphere was pretty chill; one of my Spanish interviewers was a PHD student which is always less intimidating, and everyone was really lovely!

How did you prepare for your interviews?

I googled “impressive french books to read” and read the ones that came up, also if you look at the reading lists, read the books on there because less preparatory reading if you do get in lol. For MML I tried to fairly diversify between literature, film, philosophy and art so I had a little bit of everything to talk about. Also, this gives you a slight precursor into the course to see if it something you’d actually want to study and invest time in :)

What advice would you give to future applicants?

Honestly don’t stress too much- the interviewers will recognise your intelligence. There were times in my interview when I thought I was totally bombing it, but it worked out for me in the end.