Geography @ Christ Church, Oxford in 2019

Interview format

GAT; 2x interviews.

Interview content

Article and picture prompts; personal statement.

Best preparation

Prepared personal statement knowledge; kept up with current affairs; wider research.

Final thoughts

Be confident and think out loud.

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

Test taken: Geography Admissions Test (GAT)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 3 hours
Length of interviews: 30 mins
Online interview: No

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

In my human geography interview, we discussed news articles relevant to where we were from. I was given pictures and asked to talk about them and say what I see and make inferences. My personal statement was discussed and my opinion on topics was asked. In my physical geography interview, my desire to study Geography further was discussed as well as my personal statement. I was also shown pictures and asked to talk about them from which, further discussions about topics developed and they asked what I'd possibly do for a dissertation. Both were quite nerve wracking at first, but then I settled in and they went by quite quickly. The interviewers were very relaxed at made you feel at ease throughout.

How did you prepare for your interviews?

I went through all the books/journals in my personal statement and made notes on them. I also went through my personal statement meticulously and annotated areas where I thought questions could be asked and tried to answer them myself. I looked at recent news articles and tried talking about them as well as articles relevant to topics I was interested in. I also did some wider research on more topics I was interested in and talked about it with a supervisor who posed questions.

If you took a test, how did you prepare?

There were only two sample papers available so I used them and asked my teachers to find me data/extracts and create questions that I could use in a similar manner to the papers.

What advice would you give to future applicants?

Go in with as much confidence as possible because I met people from elite private schools applying for the same subject and felt quite intimidated, but if your confidence comes through, your passions to study the subject will be shown. The interviews were much more relaxed than I thought they'd be but being nervous is understandable. Think out loud during the interview so that the tutors can hear your thought process as you may say something that interests them. They don't know what your thinking as you have to tell them. Also bear in mind how you can show them that your'e teachable (e.g. they present you with an idea or a fact and you use it later during the interview).