Physics @ St Hugh's, Oxford in 2017

Interview format

3x 20-30 min interviews, 1 day apart

Interview content

Interview 1: short questions; Interview 2: personal statement, more detailed question connected to personal statement; Interview 3: combination of these

Best preparation

How you set out PAT solutions is important

Advice in hindsight

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Final thoughts

Don't worry if you don't know what to do at interview.

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: PAT

Number of interviews: 3

Skype interview: No

Time between each interview: 1 day

Length of interviews: 20-30 minutes each

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

Of my three interviews, each followed a slightly different format.

The first was a series of quick-fire questions that seemed designed to test how many I could get through in the time allocated.

The second started with some discussion of my personal statement, which then led onto a more detailed question that was relevant to one of the books I'd read.

My final interview was a slightly odd mix of the two, and they seemed to run out of questions to ask me towards the end.

How did you prepare?

The PAT practice papers are obviously the best place to start, however the limited number and lack of mark schemes can be an issue. Ideally, ask a teacher or peer to "mark" your attempts to the best of their ability, but also understand that - unlike a school exam - there is no set "correct" answer to a lot of questions and so how you approach and set out the problem is very important. Having said this, the physicsandmathstutor website has some decent attempts at answering the papers, which can be helpful to compare to your own. If you want more papers of a similar style, the physics Olympiad papers make useful practice.

Preparation for the PAT is definitely important, if not necessary, as there may be content included that you have not yet covered at school. Preparing for the interview is a trickier matter. There are many top-selling books that claim to tell you the secret to Oxbridge interviews, and personally I don't think they're worth much. There's no secret you need to know, and they're unlikely to try to trap or trick you.

What advice do you have for future applicants?

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

The tutors will be stern but fair, and they want an honest indication of how well you can take on board suggestions and combine them with your prior knowledge to answer questions you won't have seen before.

As is always said, the worst thing you can do is to say and do nothing. If you get asked a question and you have no idea what to do, then say as much and you'll be prodded in the right direction. Being able to take such a hint and use it to get to the correct answer is much more impressive than knowing what to do straight away.