My interview was in early December. I arrived at the Porters' Lodge and the porters pointed me in the direction of the right room. I was quite early so I waited outside for a while. I was given a text in German to read for around 15 minutes before the interview. When I went into the room the 2 interviewers were very friendly and tried to put me at ease. The interview room was like a living room with comfy chairs which made me feel a bit less nervous. We spoke about the text in German and then spoke about my personal statement in English and it seemed to go well.

Later on in the day, just after lunch, we had a short test. All of the interviewees were together for this, and before going into the room some of the applicants seemed to be trying to psych people out but I did my best to ignore them. For the test, we had to respond to an essay question in the target language (we could choose which language). This lasted about an hour. Later on in the afternoon, I had my French interview, which followed exactly the same structure as the German interview. This interview was in an office, which I found a bit scary and my interviewers were quite intimidating and less smiley.

In both interviews we discussed the contents of the text in the target language.There was also a grammar question in both interviews which was based on an example sentence taken from the text. In my French interview, we then moved on to a more general discussion about literature and what I thought about the books I mentioned in my personal statement. At the end, we also discussed my EPQ - what I had researched and what my findings were. In German, we focussed the discussion more on linguistics as I had mentioned this in my personal statement. We talked about how the relationships between English, German and French.The test centred around a social issue. The questions were more complex that A Level work, but were about topics for which I had vocab.

Reading through everything I had mentioned in my personal statement, a practice interview organised by my school (even though it was nothing like the real thing).

When talking about literature, I didn’t really know what I was talking about, but I just kept talking as much as I could and that seemed to do the trick! My interviewers were happy to guide me to the right answer, I wasn’t completely lost. I would also recommend staying away from other applicants as far as possible - it’s a shame, but there was at least one person who was trying to psych others out. I avoided all of the other interviewees to help me stay focussed.