Natural Sciences (Physical) @ Churchill, Cambridge in 2015

Interview format

None; 2x interviews.

Interview content

Interview 1: personal background; Interview 2: maths and physics questions, unfamiliar material, problem solving.

Best preparation

Come prepared with an understanding of the interview process.

Test preparation

N/A

Final thoughts

Make sure you think aloud!

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: 15 minutes
Length of interviews: 1 hour
Online interview: No

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

One of the interviews was a general discussion about my background and education up to that point. The other was much more technical, it started with a short question sheet with some basic maths problems, that in my opinion did not exceed the difficulty of advanced A-level questions. I then had one multi-part physics question focusing on showing my thorough understanding of the topic rather than fact memorisation.

The last question seemed to be inspired by my personal statement because I outlined some of my interests in sciences there, and I was asked a question from an area that was completely separate from any of them. I believe that was to test how well I apply my knowledge and skills to novel, previously unseen, problems and situations. I needed a lot of help from the interviewers to get anywhere with that question, which might be one of the reasons I got pooled into another college.

How did you prepare for your interviews?

I browsed the internet to read about what Oxbridge interviews typically look like.

If you took a test, how did you prepare?

N/A

What advice would you give to future applicants?

Try to be as explicit in explaining your thought process out loud, that will allow the interviewers to see how you think and correct mistakes if they see fit, preventing you from wasting time on useless lines of enquiry. Probably partly because of stress, I spent most of my last question thinking of ideas from molecular physics when the set up was macroscopic, I imagine the interviewers would have very quickly corrected me if they knew what I was thinking.