So you think you can apply to Cambridge? Round 3!

The Interview:

Tongue-tied, drenched in sweat, few hundred applicants to Cambridge each year had to face the famed fear-inducing interview. According to the video of the interview webpage, the Cambridge interviewers are generally nice and tries to put the applicants at ease; they are looking at your thinking processes, your knowledge in the field of study and your application of that knowledge.

~The Interview~

The format of the interview is a mano-el-mano interview, where you will face some of the faculty of Cambridge in a 20 minute mental smackdown. Unlike most interviews, the interview will have some written questions where you have to draw graphs, solve IQ problems and also some weird questions you have never seen before. Examples for the interview questions have included: Why do bullets spiral? (Engineering), how do you measure the mass of a human head? (Medic) and how do you explain complex numbers in everyday terms? (Mathematics) And unlike Oxford (Another dastardly tricky interviewer), Cambridge interviews most of it applicants as long as you meet the minimum requirements.

The interview is purely academic, so if you are the sort that likes to read encyclopedias and those Horrible Science series, then it will definitely be at advantage for you. Having lots of these general knowledge really helps; or else how are you going to answer the "Why do bullets spiral?" question if you don't know about the rifling of guns? I think Cambridge really appreciates the type of people who are innately curious explorers and creative thinkers, so don't stay confined within your A-Levels syllabus. Read more in the field that you are intending to study. And practice on this.

I also think that the interview is not something that you can prepare beforehand; it takes months and maybe years to have the knowledge foundation to face off with the Cambridge interviewers. And basically they can ask you anything under the sun - from programming robots to explaining jet engines to describing wind turbines - so how are you going to prepare for it? Of course, the brushing up of your A-Levels studies is a must, but then again, you can't exactly prepare for the onslaught of weird questions that will definitely appear. It is unpredictable.

Take me for an example, I tried my best in preparing for the interview by borrowing a book on gadgets and science and really tried my best to cover as much ground as possible. I learnt about the inner workings of washing machines, guns, gyroscope, the Hubble space telescope, wind turbines (it's mentioned twice for a reason) etc. I also went for  a mock interview organised by Mabecs (the UK educational counselor remember?) which I did pretty well. I think that the mock interview was pretty well done, as its simulation of a Cambridge interview was accurate. I remember trepidation, sweat oozing under armpits and shaky limbs, but also confidence in what I'm talking about and calm thinking. I was tested on something I didn't learn before in my mock interview, but still I answered in a placid manner, which was so much different from my performance in the real interview.

The real thing:

I went for my interview two days after my written tests, and it was held at home ground - Sunway College. My interview starts at roughly noon time but I went there around 30 minutes earlier. I was wearing suit and tie but instead of accentuating my confidence, they hid my fears. After waiting for some time, I was called to the interview room.

For the first few minutes, the interview went quite smoothly, the interviewer asked me for my details and my background and said that I have done my work. Then he (the interviewer) asked me about my  interests in engineering and it all went downhill from there.

Him: So what are you interested to do in engineering?
Me: Power, energy. The transformation of energy from one form to another through machines.
Him: Give me an example of such machines.
Me: Wind turbines.

As you can see, I sort of dug my own grave. To be honest, I know quite a bit about wind turbines but I could never predict the direction that the interview would go. First the interviewer asked me to describe a workable dynamo, which gave me a sweat because it was SPM work and I have just all but forgotten about it. However the next part was the hardest as I was asked to design the dynamo in different ways. But (some sort of) common sense helped me along the way. However I was so nerve-wrecked by the dynamo question that later I started fumbling throughout. The stern face of the interviewer didn't help either.

When I got back, I immediately googled "I failed the Cambridge interview. What to do next?" The results were encouraging. Majority of the answers say that the perception of your performance is quite subjective, basically, there is no RIGHT and no WRONG. The interviewers are looking at your thinking pattern and how you tackle problems using your knowledge. You could be answering questions wrongly all the time but if you are barking up the right tree you can still get in.

However, for my case, I was rejected by Cambridge in the end, though some of my friends who got the same interviewer got in. So I guess that some mistakes are costly in the end.

So what do you think? Please comment below.

UPDATE:

I saw this every interesting post on Quora the other day and I think it is worth sharing out to the students out there. It is about the apparent high acceptance rate of Oxbridge as compared to the Ivies. Anzo, one of my PI writers had suggested that in order to apply to Cambridge, one has to be confident of scoring 4A* in their A-Levels exams. Best of luck to those who are applying to Cambridge this year.