Test taken: Natural Sciences Admissions Assessment (NSAA)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 2 hours
Length of interviews: 30 minutes
Online interview: Yes

I had two interviews, one about maths and one about physics. The maths one started off with quite a difficult graph sketching question that I took a while to figure out with the help of the interviewer but I got there eventually. Next was a pretty well-known probability logic problem which was easy to explain since I had already heard of it. Then we moved onto a question that included some maths which was beyond what I had learnt in class but after expressing that, they simplified the question so that I could understand it in a more non-technical way. However, before I could really get into the answer we ran out of time and so they ended the interview (I originally thought that the interview didn’t go that great but on retrospect I don’t think I did much wrong).

The second one was honestly fun for me. We started off doing a basic discussion of the energy changes in a fairly simple system and then moved on to some non-quantitative physics problems. These were very fun to work through and though I didn’t necessarily get them immediately, we talked about them together until I eventually figured them out. A lot of my mock interviews focused on doing actual calculations but in this interview, I didn’t calculate anything, we just talked the problems through and I found that quite fun.

One big thing that surprised me is that they didn’t talk about anything on my personal statement at all, nothing close to it ever came up. The atmosphere in the interviews was quite chilled out for me, it much more felt like a discussion than a test. I feel like the main thing they’re trying to figure out is whether or not you would be good for the supervision system at Cambridge and so the interviews try to reflect that atmosphere which can be quite nice.

My school set up mock interviews which gave me a general idea of how the interviews are but they honestly weren’t super close to how the actual interviews went. I also did some more Isaac Physics questions specifically focusing on sketching graphs which proved fairly useful. It’s good to read around your subject as they often try and talk about stuff that’s not necessarily on the syllabus but isn’t too hard to hear about. The biggest thing is to not sweat prepping for the interview much since the best thing to have is a passion for your subject and to really enjoy talking about it and that’s not really something you can prepare for an interview.

Practice papers (to get a feel for how the paper is - be careful with doing too many as you can psyche yourself out), https://exams.ninja/nsaa/ (has a bunch of extra exam questions and advice for the NSAA and more stuff behind a paywall which I didn’t personally use but could be good), Isaac Physics (Not exactly perfect for the NSAA but great for practicing problems in a style to how you do them at university as well as improving general skills). 

I think it’s important not to stress out too much, it’s very easy to get swept up in everyone freaking out and over-preparing but there really isn’t that much you need to do. Just try and relax and enjoy solving problems with your interviewers as this is the most likely thing that’ll get you remembered.