I had two interviews; one for each language. Each interview was with one academic only, and they were both fairly informal and fairly short. I then had a test which if I remember correctly contained a French passage which I had to summarise in French and then write a critical response in English - both of these answers only had to be short (I think approx. 200-300 words).

I found both interviews hard and I felt that my performance was at best mediocre throughout each of them. In my first interview (for French) we discussed my recent reading. The interviewer switched into French halfway through his sentence and this took me by surprise.

The second interview (for ab initio [editors note: ab initio means beginners] Italian) was harder than my first. The interviewer was an academic from the Spanish department and we didn't discuss Italian specifically, although we did talk about how I was preparing for the course. He also showed me a text (in English) and asked me to comment on it critically. The most challenging bit of the second interview was when I mentioned that I was reading a general history of Europe and the interviewer encouraged me to define more carefully the key concepts and terms I was using. I genuinely have no idea what rubbish I came up with my response!

My school did nothing to help me for my interviews, so I just had to prepare in whatever ways I could think of - the lack of guidance I had in preparing might have allowed me to be myself more and could actually have helped me get in. Because I was in the dark about what to expect, I just read a LOT of books: for languages I would recommend reading both fiction and non-fiction books in English and your foreign language(s).

Be yourself - don't try to second-guess what the interviewer wants to hear from you, because they will see right through it. Also, try to view the interview as a conversation between adults: say what you think, back it up and have confidence in what you're saying.