<p>Hello,</p>
<p>I recently applied to Cambridge University and am under no illusion of the difficulty posed when attempting to gain a place. I was wondering if any Cambridge alumni or former applicants could help shed light on what makes a good application and interview. (I am applying for Natural Sciences)</p>
<p>Too late for improving the application bit now. The deadline is today!</p>
<p>cupcake, do you have anything to tell us about the interview? I’m going to have mine in slightly over a week’s time in my country.</p>
<p>My interview was not that scary. What happens depends on the subject and college. I guess it also might be different if you are doing it by SKYPE rather than in person. I know some people had to do written tests at interview (especially for math) but I guess you couldn’t do that via SKYPE.</p>
<p>I had two interviews at Caius and then 2 pool interviews at Murray Edwards. In one of the Caius interviews there were two interviewers. They ask you leading questions where you won’t know the answer, and there may not be a correct answer. It’s more about the way you think than what you know. I have written about this at length on this board before. One of the questions I has I was shown some slides of cells. i had to work out what kind of cells they were. They had lots of mitochondria so i said that meant they needed lots of energy (correct). They were probably therefore muscle (correct) perhaps leg muscle of an active animal (incorrect). They were bat wing muscles. </p>
<p>Have you read this BBC article? Note I had a version of the why are strawberries red question (why are these curtains blue) and I answered it completely differently to the suggested answer. I talked about electrons and light wavelengths. I still got in.</p>
<p>[BBC</a> News - Demystifying the Oxford interview process](<a href=“http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-15170995]BBC”>Demystifying the Oxford interview process - BBC News)</p>
<p>There are also videos of interviews on both the Cambridge and Oxford websites.</p>
<p>Hope this helps.</p>