How to ace your Oxbridge interview

Interviews are an integral part of the application process and completely unavoidable for Economics. Although admissions teams will tell you they take a holistic approach to reviewing your application, there is a consensus that the interview is the most important part of the application.

An interview situation attempts to mimic what is known as ‘supervisions’ (or ‘tutorials’ at Oxford), where you are asked to complete a piece of work which is then marked; and the content is reviewed in a small group environment. Some colleges will indeed ask you to complete a piece of work prior to interview or send in an essay that you recently wrote. Cambridge prides itself on being able to teach you through these supervisions and so demonstrating that it is an environment you can thrive in will ensure the interviewers are confident in your ability to succeed on the course. Given we can’t provide specifics into the interview questions, we have prepared some general advice that will give you the best shot at landing the offer:

Content:

• Re-read your personal statement and make sure you know it inside out, and for each topic make sure you have done further reading beyond it (doesn't have to be too much, they won't expect you to know all of what they discuss).
• Make sure you are acing A-level Economics because the economic theory they'll ask you about will be top end A-level Economics stuff but mostly pushing onto the first things of what you do at Cambridge, so make sure you have the basics covered.
• Harness the supply-demand framework. Some questions may appear very complicated but can often be broken down using a framework as simple as supply and demand.
• Ensure you understand several key areas of first year microeconomics: indifference curves, production functions (e.g. Cobb Douglas), utility functions, constrained optimisation – these areas strongly tie into calculus and functions. Game theory is very common so ensure you understand the intuition behind concepts such as Nash equilibria and backward induction. Finally, probability may feature, especially conditional probability so recap this.
• Make sure you're acing A-level Maths and Further Maths (if you do it) - before the interview, your college will require you to submit all the topics you have covered in each A-Level so they can select appropriate questions. Expect a large chunk of your interview(s) to be based on maths. It may also be worth looking at some more TMUA style questions even though you'll probably be sick of them by now if you've reached interview stage.

Approach:

• Always be willing to challenge or clarify terms used in the questions so ask good questions! The worst situation is to be giving an answer to a question you don’t understand.
• Take your time. It is ok to ask for some time to think (within reason!). When I found myself stuck, I would have a long sip of water to give me some more time!
• Try not to blurt out guesses. Always try to simplify problems into steps and make these clear to the interviewer. Giving answers with little justification is not what they want to see.
• Just be calm and be yourself. This may sound cliche but it's true. They will know if you are right for the course, so make sure you convey that by being as enthusiastic about the course as possible.
• Don't stress if you get anything wrong, just move on. Almost every student being interviewed will have gotten something wrong.
• Have a look at some general problem-solving puzzles/scenarios. This part is going a bit beyond (neither of us did this), but logic questions often have game theoretic elements and are good examples of where they'll be able to see how you think.