I took the Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA) took in November. It was a sit-down 1 hour exam at school. Topics included maths, further maths, physics and chemistry. You can’t use a calculator so you have to do calculations by hand.

At Churchill I had one interview (c. 30 minutes) and no exam on the day. There were two interviewers: a physicist and a geologist.

There was a focus on both physics and geology (because this was the focus of my personal statement) and I had separate questions on each. For geology, I was given a rock and we discussed ridge formation. A tip would be to think outside the box of A-Levels: not the all the causes we talked about were purely geological.

For physics, I was given a choice of questions to answer and work through with them. I chose an easy one which was just simple integration. I then chose a ball trajectory question / differential equation similar to the ones you learn in M5 [Editor's Note: An A-level maths module]. One of the interviewers gave help where I needed it. I was also given a question about a situation of inter-atomic forces which involved drawing graphs about the forces change over time. All of this was stuff I had covered at A-Level.

They didn’t mention my personal statement or any of my work experience.

I called up Churchill before my interview and went to be shown around and ask questions while I was there. I wanted to ask if they would take someone who had applied to another college the year before (which I had - unsuccessfully to St John’s College the year before). They care that you enjoy working and that you are enthusiastic about the subject - this is the main thing to prepare for showing at the interview! Isaacphysics.org (which was created by Churchill) was really useful for practice.

People were actually really nice at the interview - not weird. Try not to give too much away at interview in case you give other people an advantage who haven’t had their interview. Also, in the interview itself, if you don’t appear stressed then they might think you know what you’re doing!

Choosing a college was really important. I made a spreadsheet. I then crossed off colleges that were far away from the centre of town, were only for mature students, or which were only for girls. I then compared sports at each college as well as more general statistics like student satisfaction and more qualitative impressions of student life. Colleges are not always very similar (your work is set by a supervisor in college and progress tests are within college). If you struggle to motivate yourself then maybe pick a college that makes you work!