Natural Sciences (Physical) @ Sidney Sussex, Cambridge in 2014

Interview format

1x test (1hr); 1x interview

Interview content

Quite general questions in interview

Best preparation

Try various Olympiads & Maths Challenges

Final thoughts

Don't worry if you don't know an answer immediately - interviewers will help you through

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

My interview was in early December. I was told I would be taking a pre-interview testby email, and on arrival at the college on the day of the interview I was directed to a room with some other candidates to sit the test, which lasted one hour.

Afterwards, I was directed to a room in another part of college for an interview with two fellows, taking my answers with me. One fellow looked over my test quickly while the other asked me questions, and then both joined in in interviewing me, including guiding me through one of the questions I'd struggled with.

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

I'd been asked to select my two best topics prior to the interview, so the test was comprised of questions from these topics (physics and chemistry, in my case). Some of the test questions were hard, while some were (relatively) easy -- I had 10 in total but I wasn't expected to complete all of them or even the majority. One question was quite familiar but the others were new.

The interview itself wasn't as intimidating as I had expected, as the interviewers were quite friendly. I'd looked up what they specialised in beforehand but that didn't end up being very relevant to the interview as they asked fairly general physics, maths and chemistry questions. I was also asked to expand on and clarify a few points on my personal statement. At the end, they asked me to calculate a problem that I didn't have the tools (i.e. knowledge of a certain equation) to answer! So they gave me a lot of hints (including the equation) and I was able to solve it.

How did you prepare?

Olympiad questions - Senior Maths Challenge, Chemistry Olympiad (BChO), Physics Olympiad (BPhO). The questions are very similar in style to the questions asked at interview and in the test, in that they only rely on A-level knowledge but require you to think about and apply it in novel ways. Being good at these gets you in the right mindset to approach an interview!

Looking back, what advice would you give to your past self?

Don't fluster if you don't know the answer to a question immediately! Say what you do know and explain your thought processes -- if you're missing something, the interviewers will give you hints, and what they want to see is *how* you solve and approach problems. They're not expecting people to be an encyclopaedia of extracurricular knowledge!