My Cambridge Interview Experience — Back in 2015
I wrote this right after my Natural Sciences interview at Cambridge in 2015, for my own record. I rediscovered this recently on my computer. Although I didn’t get the offer at Cambridge, I thought that my experience might be useful for people who are going for Cambridge interviews in the future, so I decided to share it here.
Let me give you some context: I was an international student from Taiwan and dropped out of the local high school to pursue higher education in the UK. I moved to the UK alone, at the age of 17 in autumn 2014. I studied at a sixth form college in Cambridge, studying biology, maths, further maths, physics and chemistry in both AS and A2 years. A level was easy; maybe, easy for an Asian who came from a highly pressurized schooling system in Taiwan. I applied to do a degree in Natural Sciences at Downing College, Cambridge. I got my interview invitation letter in October and went to the interview in early December.
Now that I’m reading this again 5 and a half years later, my writing was quite dramatic (lol). So here it begins:
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It was 12:30 pm. I walked out of my school, cycled down Bateman Street, then turned left into Regent Street. After locking my bike at Parkers Piece, I walked across the street and entered the main gate of Downing College, the best place on Earth to study Natural Sciences. I went to the West Lodge for the interview registration.
The first stage of the interview was a 30 mins math test, which started at 13:30. It was in the basement of the College Bar. There were 9 people, including me. I was able to complete all the questions. I revised C1 to C4 (A level Maths) for 2 weeks before the interview, and I also revised FP1-FP3 (A level Further Maths) again the day before the interview, however, the questions were all from C1-C3, and less challenging than I expected. Only the first question was a bit tricky, a graph sketching question, the rest were fine.
The first interview was at 14:30, in set H room number 7. There were two interviewers in this session: a man who did HIV research, and a lady who did something in chemical engineering and biotechnology. The room was cream coloured, with a green line at waist level around the room. The door was at the south-east of the room, with a desk and a chair in the north, 2 smaller sofas and one long sofa and one table with papers, 2 pens, 2 pencils at the centre. There was a long, low shelf in the south with a ball and stick model of diamond and NaCl on it. There was another huge bookshelf in the north-east.
The first question was from the lady. She asked me about my shadowing experience at the Babraham Institute. I think I was nervous and thus didn’t answer so well. Next, she asked me to sketch a graph y=y0*e^(-Bt). That was not difficult, I got it immediately. She told me y represented the fish population in a pond and asked me if the fish population will increase indefinitely to infinity. I said, no, there were many limiting factors to the fish population such as food source, size of habitat, disease, and predators. However, those were not the ones she was looking for. She gave me a hint- “I feed them, right?” “If you eat a lot……” I said “If I eat a lot… I will get fat?” Ah, I screwed this up. Eventually, she told me the answer she wanted was the nitrogen waste concentration in the pond. (After a few months I realised that this nitrogen concentration thing was mentioned in the first chapter of the A2 biology textbook. In my A2 year, I was taking biology “for fun” so didn't bother to study it until right before the exam. Take home message: know your course material well before you go for the interview!)
Then she passed me to the other interviewer. The first few questions were straightforward. “What is acid?”, “What is the difference between strong and weak acid?”, “Please write down the expression for pH”, “Please write down the expression for equilibrium constant.” Then he asked me if I had come across pKa. I did, but I forgot about it. He assumed that I have not learnt it yet, so he gave me the equation for it: pKa= -log Ka, and he asked me to combine the formula for pH, pKa and Ka. It was easy, I got pH= pKa + log([H+]/[HA]). Then he said, “Please sketch a graph for percentage of [H+] versus pH.” I was not able to understand what he meant by “Percentage of [H+]” but he guided me and I finally got the answer for it.
This interview lasted for about 25 minutes. The next interview was at 17:45, so I ended up staying in the waiting room for 3 hours (I did go out for 1 hour to buy a biscuit.) In the waiting room, I met people who just finished their first interview for Engineering. There was a boy from Hong Kong and a girl from Essex. They said their interview was hard. I did not find my interview hard at all, and so I was slightly worried.
I was the last interviewer for that day. It was a physics interview, in the East Lodge set R room 3. Two interviewers this time as well. One interviewer researched MRI and brain structure, and the other was a specialist in thin-film material. Both were women. The MRI lady started asking me questions. She asked me to sketch a graph for y= e^x*cos(x) and y= e^sin(x). Those were easy, got both of them in minutes. Then she gave me a diagram where a box sits stationary on a slope, and she wanted me to draw a force diagram for that. That was also easy, but I didn’t draw the origin of forces accurately, so she asked me to draw another one, so I did it. Then she asked me if we change the environment — if we bring this block to a space station where g=0, and we still apply the same forces on the block as in the diagram, what will happen. It took me about 2 minutes. I answered that the centre of mass will be stationary, but it will rotate.
The next question was about how to measure gravity, the “g”.
She drew me a diagram like the one above. She asked me what measurement I would make to calculate g. I said the height of the projector, the horizontal travel distance of the bullet until it reaches the ground. She then asked me how I am going to measure the horizontal distance. I said to use a high-speed camera or a ruler, but that was not the answer she wanted. What she wanted me to say was to paint the bullet. Somehow, she also mentioned using a light gate as she talked me through, I thought she was tired, then realised that it was a hint. Making a time measurement would make the experiment simpler to perform. I finished the question with h= ½ gt². The horizontal distance measurement was redundant.
She passed me to the other interviewer. The question was about terminal velocity. She first asked me to define “viscosity”. Then she sketched an object in the liquid travelling downwards and asked me to draw a force diagram for that. I forgot to put the “upthrust”, so she told me I forgot to put upthrust. But at that moment, I did not know what the word “upthrust” meant. Ah, fuck it. Then she asked me to design an experiment to determine the viscosity of the liquid, and my interview was over even before the question was solved.
On my way home, I thought about my interview. I thought I could have done better. Their questions were not difficult. On the Cambridge website, they said the interviewers are going to test your limit, but I couldn’t feel it. However, I thought I could have reacted faster, so they had time to ask harder questions. I also could have listened to their questions more carefully and to speak more, to show them that I know more than what they expect me to know.
They are going to send me a letter with their decision in the next month. No matter if it is an offer (unlikely) or rejection, or pool, the interview was a memorable experience for me.
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I received a letter from them in January 2016; I was pooled as expected. In official terms, “pool” means that although the college thought you were good enough for Cambridge, they do not have enough places to give an offer, so they will pool you and hopefully other colleges might pick you up. But this is just a “softer” rejection. You are rejected without being told that you are rejected.
The pool (rejection) letter told me I could ask for feedback for the interview. I asked for it. They sent me back a full A4 page long email explaining what I did and didn’t do well in the interviews. They were essentially saying, my English was not good enough. I had only stayed in the UK for just over a year, so it was fair enough.
I ended up being accepted by UCL, where I met many other exciting Cambridge rejects (JK). In the next one blog post, I might write about how I improved my English skills. More on that later…
