Test taken: Mathematics Admissions Test (MAT)
Number of interviews: 6
Time between interviews: About a day
Length of interviews: Around 30 minutes
Online interview: Yes

I had 6 interviews and all of them were quite different, so I would say there is a lot of variety in interviews. In one of my interviews, there was a main overarching maths problem that I and the tutor worked through together. I would voice my ideas on how to solve each step of the problem and he would help me along if I got stuck and let me know if I was on the right track. We used an app called Miro which is a whiteboard app where we could both draw on the screen, so the tutor could see my working. One of my philosophy interviews had a similar style, where the tutor asked a philosophical question and we worked through answering it together. Another one of my interviews consisted of multiple different questions from different areas of CS and maths, and we spent a shorter time on each one. Some of my interviews were more problem sheet style, where we had a list of CS or Phil problems and worked through them. For one of my interviews, I was given a worksheet to work on about 40 minutes before the interview, and we discussed the worksheet during the interview. For my first one or two interviews, I was really nervous and couldn't focus properly. But as they went on I was able to relax into them and that's when they got easier.

My school organised practice interviews for anyone applying to Oxbridge, since a lot of my teachers studied at either university. I went to those practice interviews and spoke to my teachers afterwards about how I did. For the philosophy interviews, since I had never done philosophy before, I read up on areas of philosophy that I was interested in. This was in the form of books recommended by Oxford, books recommended by my teacher who studied philosophy, and articles/videos/podcasts I found online. The topics that I read about didn't actually end up coming up in any of my interviews, but knowing that I already had some knowledge allowed me to enter the interviews in a calmer state of mind. The best thing I did was probably trying as best as possible to relax just before each interview. They are already difficult but they become a lot more difficult when you're nervous. I enjoyed them a lot more when I was relaxed.

I did the provided practice papers, remembering to time myself because timing is really important. There is not a lot of time for a lot of questions.

Looking back, I definitely would've spent more time preparing for the MAT test. The papers tend to get more difficult every year, and since I only did the earlier years' past papers, I was shocked by the difficulty of the paper and didn't do as well as I could've. So if you're doing a test, make sure to recent past papers as well as older ones, since they can change a lot over the years. My computer science interviews were pretty similar to what I expected, but the philosophy interviews were a lot more logic and reasoning-focused than I thought they would be. So if you're doing a philosophy interview, especially CSP, do some practice logic and reasoning puzzles. At the end of the day, the tutors are looking for someone who they think has the right mindset to pick up the material, and that they would enjoy teaching. So try to relax into it and have some fun answering the questions. If you enjoy your subject, they should be interested and fun to answer, even if a little (or a lot) nerve-wracking.