How to prepare for a Cambridge interview (Part 3)

If you haven't already, read the Part 1 and Part 2 posts on how to prepare for a Cambridge interview first.

In this post, I'm going to talk about how you can give yourself the edge in preparing for a Cambridge interview. Every year thousands of people do successfully make it through the Cambridge interview although even more are unsuccessful. All these people know what the interview is like, what went well, what didn't, how to could have prepared better and what they wish they'd known prior to the interview.

One of the best things you can do is try to find people you know who've been through a Cambridge interview, either successfully or unsuccessfully and speak to them about how they found it, what it was like and what questions they were asked. They'll be able to give you a first hand explanation of the whole process.

In an ideal situation, you should try to find someone who applied for your subject and in an ideal world, who applied to the same college as you are. This is because they'll be able to give you a real insight into how the specifics of the admissions process at that college for that subject works. It is normally the case that the same people carry out the interviews for a subject at a college every year. It'll usually be the Director of Studies at that college and maybe some other fellows or supervisors at that college who carry out the interview. The Director of Studies is the person who'll be in charge of you academically if you manage to get in.

So if you can find out what it was like for someone else who's been through the interview then you'll know better what to expect. The other thing is that the interviewers will often use a very similar interview format every year so if you can find out what this is, this will help a lot. Some interviewers even reuse the same interview questions so if you do know someone who's had an interview at your chosen college for your subject, try to find out EVERYTHING they were asked at interview. This will help you to know the sorts of things that might be asked and help guide your interview preparation. The exact same questions might not come up, or they might, but either way you'll know the kinds of questions likely to be asked.

For people at good schools with a tradition of sending people to Cambridge, getting in touch with Cambridge students to ask questions will not be a problem. But for people at worse schools, this can be difficult. There is not easy solution to this. You can try to find out if anyone from your school has applied to Cambridge before (successfully or unsuccessfully). If you can't find anyone, you could try contacting college JCRs (college level student unions) and asking to be put in touch with someone who does your subject at that college. The JCRs are student run and will usually be quite helpful so it's worth giving it a try if you don't know anyone.

Overall, it is possible to get in without knowing anyone who's done it before, but it is a lot easier if you can actually speak to students and people who've been through the process successfully and find out how they did it and their advice.