Test taken: Natural Sciences Admissions Assessment (NSAA)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: A few hours
Length of interviews: 25-30 mins
Online interview: Yes

Both interviews started with one question on my personal statement. They don't *really* care about going into detail, but be prepared to have a decently solid answer. Hopefully you haven't lied in your personal statement. The goal of this is to show you it's just a conversation. Take it seriously, of course, but you won't improve your score more by trying to act like you're more serious than others. One interviewer put in a joke as part of the interview (which I didn't get immediately 😅). I was always thinking quite a lot before I answered, they don't mind if you pause to think for 10-15 seconds before starting with an answer. I think that's the best way to do it. 

In my first interview, I was shown pictures of living things, and we just discussed what it looked like to me. You will not know/understand everything they are showing you, they just want you to show what your intuition says about what you're looking at. You're trying to make a good guess. I threw in a couple of references to some supercurricular exploration or even just general knowledge to justify what I thought I was looking at. The second interviewer asked me some decently basic Chemistry questions. Of course, you'd still have to be clever and really understand the interactions between molecules - and once again, you'd have to invent answers to explain phenomena. It's about intuition. The second interviewer only had 5 minutes, so we didn't cover much.

In my second interview, I was asked a question about evolution, and I didn't immediately know the answer but had to work through it. There was a similar idea with the second interviewer, who for fifteen minutes made me completely lost, but slowly guided me towards the right answer. You have to be creative and persevere, don't be worried by the idea of this big question because the interviewer will guide you more or less depending on how you need it - what they are looking for is what you're thinking of when searching the answer. 

My Oxbridge coordinator had a packet of practice interview questions that I practiced through. In reality, the interviews are literally just a conversation, so I did little practice. If your interview is more than 3 months away, then maybe you can do something to seriously improve your score - having regular discussions with friends about STEM stuff (i.e., being part of the nerd squad) was very important for me as I was already trained to think of ideas on the spot and out loud. I also consistently asked very hard questions in class and I chased up on every detail, which was another advantage.

Being able to link things together is a skill that the interview will highlight. Coming into your interview having accumulated one month's worth of reading into your subject ('supercurricular') doesn't do much. It needs to be something that you've done for quite a while because the buildup of a lot of knowledge will allow you to shine supercurricular stuff from time to time when your interview will cover not much. I'm thinking of (example and was NOT in my interview) "Oh that circulatory system looks like a typical mamallian system, as it's a double closed system", or "Kinda like how butterflies slowly evolved to be darker because the smoke humans released from their chimneys gave them a camouflage advantage".

Did all the past papers. Over the summer, I also did all the BMAT past papers. UKMT Senior Challenge was also good practice. And of course, focussing really hard in every lesson I was in.

You need to discuss ideas that you've studied with other people who are also aiming high. Learning about enzyme inhibitors? Oooh, I'm thinking about how that could be used in medicine. Learning about SA:V ratios? I'm thinking about how my loft room (higher SA:V) cools down quicker than my living room (lower SA:V). Go google stuff about what you've learnt too (supercurricular). How have enzyme inhibitors been used in medicine? I've done OCR biology and its exam questions are fantastic for training your outside-the-box thinking which is what they want to see in your interviews. Go get your practice questions done!