The Oxbridge interviews are one of the main criteria for selecting successful applicants. For Cambridge applicants, If you apply from select countries overseas, you will have one interview. If you fly to the UK in non-pandemic years, you will get 2 interviews. For Oxford applicants, interviewers are more rare, but applicants who do get them usually get at least 2 interviews. This post will guide you through some insights and ideas that might help your interview preparation process and provide interview techniques that will help flesh out your academic capabilities to your interviewer.
The Academic Interview 🎓
The interview is an academically focused one. It matters less of who you are and how you present yourself and what matters most is how you think. The interview is meant to simulate a supervision in Cambridge or a tutorial in Oxford so they can ascertain whether or not you are suited for this way of learning.
Structure of the Interview ⛩️
The interview usually lasts around 30 minutes. It starts with a warm up question or two to help with your nerves. Then your interviewer might ask you a question in your personal statement, followed by a few technical questions comprising of problems that are related to your field.
Warm Up Questions 🌡️
They usually are simple questions that should be obvious to you as an applicant, such as “Why did you choose Engineering?” or “Why Choose Pembroke College”. If you don’t feel confident in giving answers to these questions in a surefire way, be sure to have some prepared answers to these questions so that you won’t spend unnecessary time thinking and fretting about the answers. An important thing to remember when answering these questions is to show your passion and enthusiasm when answering them. If the passion and enthusiasm shown in your personal statement isn’t shown during your interview, it might cause your interviewer to doubt how genuine your personal statement is.
The Personal Statement Related Question 📜
You should know every single part of your personal statement inside out. Writing down something on your personal statement implies that this is something that you feel represents your understanding of your subject or explains your passion towards the subject. A good way to test your understanding of your personal statement is to ask friends and teachers to read through your personal statement and ask questions about parts that they are interested in. If you can answer those questions in a way that a lay man can understand the concept, you have sufficiently prepared for this question. Another way is going through each sentence that contains academic content and trying to ask questions that go deeper into the subject and attempt to understand it.
Here is an example for Engineering or Physics. If your personal statement explained the idea of moment of inertia and equations related to it when an object spins about an axis, questions you might ask are “What happens if there is rotation about multiple axes? What equations are used to mathematically model the motion of the object?”.
Here is an example for a Mathematics applicant. If your personal statement contains a passage expressing your astonishment at the beauty of Green’s Theorem or the Divergence theorem. It might be a good idea to go through the proofs of those theories and some intuitive explanations and visualizations behind those theories.
Technical Questions 🔨
In this part of the interview, you will be asked questions related to your field to study. Another constraint on the questions for Cambridge applicants is that they will be somewhat related to the modules you have listed in your COPA application(essentially what chapters you have covered so far in your A Levels syllabus). Oxford applicants will also receive questions related to their syllabus but they will make assumptions based on the less specific UCAS application that does not include the modules that you have covered thus far.
Preparing for the Interview
Internalize the A Level syllabus 🅰️
Mastering the A Level syllabus (or any other syllabus that you take) is the minimum requirement to do well in the interview. Especially for STEM subjects where concepts are built upon each other, having strong fundamentals will really help your experience during the interview. A way to ensure you have completely grasped all the required concepts is to have a checklist based off the syllabus content and check off everything that you feel confident in explaining and applying in a problem solving question.
Practice Interview Questions ❔
Interview questions often are a bit different from questions your see in textbooks or normal past year papers. They require a bit more thinking outside the box and often requires you to use your existing knowledge as a stepping stone to deduce new information required to solve the problem. Here are a few resources that provide you with some questions that train those problem solving muscles required for the Oxbridge Interview.
Physics and Engineering ⚙️
This website contains around 200 interview level problems alongside with hints and video solutions to them. Although some explanations are not that clear but it is still a valuable practice resource to have.
Even though this website is notorious for being slightly annoying for troubles with submitting answers, it is nonetheless a good question bank for interview preparation needs. I recommend trying all problems at Level 5 and 6. Another good set of questions in this section is the Extraordinary Problems Section.
Not all questions in the PAT are suitable as interview practice, but for the recent years, the questions that have a higher mark allocation have been found to be good practice for interviews.
This book is a good book with interesting problems and good explanations behind them. However do selectively do problems that are related to your field. This can be done by doing questions only from relevant chapters.
Mathematics and Computer Science 🧮
Side Note: I’m not that sure about computer science but I assume that their interviews are also highly mathematical.
A compilation of all the STEP questions. This site allows you to search for STEP past questions according to topic.
This site contains modules of questions to train you to be able to solve interview questions and STEP questions. The modules introduce the concept using warm-up questions and slowly crank up the difficulty so you aren’t overwhelmed.
If you have some form of programming skills, this website is packed to the brim with mathematical computing challenges. I believe that these challenges will train you with the problem solving skills needed for the interview.
This website has a ton of mathematical resources for your perusal and are the furthest thing away from your typical math problem.
Mock Interviews 🧪
The best way to prepare for an exam is to do past papers and have mock exams. Similarly, the best way to prepare for an interview is to have mock interviews. I recommend doing at least 5 mock interviews before your actual interview. This can be done with your subject teachers, seniors who have gone through the interview themselves, or people from companies and societies that offer mock interviews. (I am offering free Engineering mock interviews until early September 2021, for details read till the end of this post)
Advanced Learning 📚
For engineering especially, there isn’t too large of a scope of things that the interviewer can ask due to the constriction of the A Levels Syllabus. Of course, they can extend ideas from the A Levels syllabus, but they can only go so far. Hence you can predict some advanced topics that might come out in the interview ahead of time and learn them. Obviously I advise against blindly learning the concepts without truly understanding it and regurgitating formulae during the interview itself. The point of the interview is to see how you think, not what you know after all. But I wouldn’t deny that being exposed to these advanced topics would definitely help you. The process of learning these topics will also train your problem solving skills which is really a case of killing two birds with one stone.
Here are a few predictions of topics for Engineering Applicants.
Mechanics ⚙️
- Rotational Mechanics
Moment of Inertia and Rotational Kinetic Energy
- Change of Reference Frame
Changing from the inertial reference frame to the Center of Mass reference frame
- Constraint Equations
Constraint equations for pulley systems
-
Projectile motion with Linear or Quadratic Drag
-
Momentum and Introductory Fluid Mechanics
Momentum and the Flow of Mass. Example
Electricity and Magnetism ⚡
- Differential Equations in analyzing a circuit
RC Circuits, LC Circuits and RLC Circuits
- Advanced Network Theory
Theverin and Norton Equivalent Networks
Mathematical Techniques 🧮
- Using Integration in Solving Physics Problems
Here are examples of this technique being put to use.
A reminder that it is NOT necessary to go through all these topics but it is recommended that you read up on the topics that bear the greatest relevance to the topics you mention in your personal statement and try some practice questions. Even if you forget the relevant equations, the interviewer will provide you with them or prompt you to help you derive them.
Preparing for Typical Questions
A typical question for most STEM interviews are graph questions. A good idea would be to study the CAIE Further Maths Pure 1 Chapter 2 Rational Functions chapter or any equivalent material to learn more about them. The chapter however, does not provide all the necessary skills for you to plot any graph that your interviewer might give you, therefore I will post a guide on Graph Sketching sometime later in this blog, so do stay tuned.
During the Interview
There are many things to keep in mind during an interview to make the most of it. Here are a few of them that I found helpful.
Silence in Moderation 🤫
A goal you would want to have is to have as little prompting given as possible. Of course, if you need prompting do not stubbornly deprive yourself of it. Being silent for long periods of time usually is followed by an interviewer giving a prompt. If you do not require a prompt, remember to inform the interviewer of whatever you are thinking about. Even if your interviewer decides to prompt you, at least he knows exactly what you are thinking about so that he may give the ideal prompt to guide you towards the right train of thought. However, do not speak mindlessly, it is perfectly fine to ask for 5 seconds or so after being given a question to think about the question before speaking.
Tackling Complexity 🤔
There are many times a question seems too complicated. The key to dealing with such a situation is to deconstruct the problem and think from first principles.
Deconstructing the problem 🏗️
Imagine you were given a complicated function to graph. You can deconstruct the problem by finding smaller and easier problems to solve. For example, “What is the minimum points and maximum points in this graph, if any?” and “What are the asymptodes in the graph?”. Persistently solving these subproblems will eventually lead you to the final solution without too much of a lag in answering the question. The ability to deconstruct a problem is also an acquired skill so do put it into practice.
First Principles Mindset 🥇
Thinking from first principles means thinking from the basic ideas and axioms that you are sure of, even if they seem obvious. For example, when given a Physics problem. You can always go back to the conservation laws:
- Conservation of Mass
- Conservation of Momentum
- Conservation of Energy
- Conservation of Angular Momentum
There are first principles to every field and every subject, identifying them before starting the interview might also be a good idea.
Visualization is Key 🖼️
Sometimes problems include objects on ramps or balls bound to strings wrapped around rods. The more complicated the mechanical or electrical system, the harder it is to analyze the problem without any visual aid. Therefore it is always in your best interests to draw out diagrams for physical systems that are mentioned in the question. Even for algorithmic and mathematical questions, using appropriate representation in a diagram can do wonders in clarifying a problem. You should never lose focus when drawing a diagram for a question, often times you can have Eureka moments when drawing these diagrams. Don’t hesitate to draw diagrams as big as possible. Small diagrams tend to clutter important aspects of the problem and confuse you.
Clarification Questions Vs Blatant Prompt Requests 💬
When you really can make no headway in a problem, you might have the tendency to blatantly ask the interviewer for a prompt. I recommend a different approach. You should ask specific questions when requesting prompting. This shows that you have analyzed the problem and understand what part of the question you lack the knowledge and insight to proceed, which is a skill in itself. As we proceed on our academic journey, we will on a regular basis, encounter questions even more difficult that those presented during the Oxbridge interview, without the help of an interviewer to prompt you and give you a straightforward answer. Learning this skill will also benefit you in those future occasions.
After the Interview
After the interview has ended, usually your interviewer will ask you if you have any questions for him. I recommend asking him about anything you found interesting during the interview or even about the interviewer’s research. (Usually you will be given the interviewers name before the interview so you can always check up his contributions to the field).
Final Thoughts 💭
The interview is a suitability test, where interviewers are tasked to determine whether or not you are suitable for the Oxbridge learning style. Therefore the best way to prepare is to learn the Oxbridge way (even though its not exclusive to Oxbridge of course). Be active in seeking out knowledge, take time and effort to solve complex problems. A good way to keep motivated in this learning process is to have a group of applicants discussing perplexing problems together. I hope that this elaborate guide has helped you to prepare for your Oxbridge interview. Don’t forget to subscribe for more content to help your application as well as to learn more about this interesting world around us.
Mock Interview Offer 😇
Hey there, thanks for reading to the end of this post. I am offering free mock interviews for engineering applicants (I can also give mock interviews for Phyiscs, Maths and Computer Science applicants as well but I can’t assure the quality of it though) from now till 10th September 2021. Here is a guide to getting a free mock interview:
- Subscribe to the newsletter.
- Share this post in social media (Facebook, Instagram or Twitter while including a link to this website) and take a screenshot.
- Contact me on my telegram by sending the screenshot of the post to discuss the details of the arrangements for the mock interview.