Psychological And Behavioural Sciences @ Newnham, Cambridge in 2015

Interview format

2x interviews (20 mins each + 20 mins reading time for one interview); 1x test (1 hour)

Interview content

General questions; personal statement; graph interpretation; the course

Best preparation

Knowing structure of course; reading over personal statement; not being put off by inaccurate interview question speculation

Final thoughts

Don't worry if other people seem better prepared on the day!

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

Two interviews (20 mins each, two interviewers present) and one exam (1 hour, choose 1 essay to write out of 10 options).

One of the interviews I was given an article to read twenty minutes before hand and I got chance to annotate it etc, then in the interview I was asked what I had thought of the article and a few questions about how it could relate to other topics.

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

We discussed the design of academic studies. I was also asked some questions about things mentioned in my personal statement. I was shown a graph and asked what I could infer from it. I was also asked a few questions like which parts of the course in particular I was looking forward to.

How did you prepare?

Made sure I knew about the structure of the course so I could mention specific modules I was interested in. Read over my personal statement and thought about how I could link together things I’d read, things I was particularly interest in and the course at Cambridge, as well as psychology in general.

The mock interview I had at school was useless as they obviously didn’t know the format of Oxbridge interviews - I got asked lots of questions about my computer skills and “I see you want to go into educational psychology, don’t you think Cambridge are more interested in finding people who will want to go into academia?” - if you get asked questions like this in a mock interview that aren’t really related to your subject then please don’t worry, as the real interview will not be like this! The real interview was far easier for me.

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

Don’t worry if other people seem to have brought loads of notes with them etc - they probably don’t know what they are doing either!