My interview was in early December. When I arrived at the college I registered at the porter's lodge and shown to my room by a student (my interview took place over two days) and then I was taken to the JCR.

The first thing I had was a set of preparatory questions, which I had 30 minutes to complete (I think). I then had an interview with two fellows where they went through my working and gave me a few hints for the harder one.

That afternoon I had a test with all the other engineering applicants interviewing on that day on maths and physics which lasted about 45 minutes.

The next morning I had a second interview with a different pair of fellows where they gave me questions on physics and material science (it was more of a maths question which turned out to be relevant to material science) and I was also asked a few questions about my personal statement.

The preparatory problems were 4 questions, 2 easy and 2 hard and you had to pick one of each and try to complete them in half an hour (I didn't manage to finish the hard one). You took your answers with you directly to the first interview where they looked through what I had done and then suggested methods that might help me to solve the harder one.

The test was multiple choice and had 19 questions (I think) ranging from the kind of thing you could do by inspection to ones that took a full side of A4 working (although my writing is large so that statement may be slightly misleading).

In the second interview I was initially asked a few questions about my personal statement by one of the fellows while the other wrote a question for me to do that related the geometry of cubes and spheres. Once I had done that the fellow who had asked me about my personal statement designed a physics problem with robotics as the context (it's the field I am interested in) that was to do with forces, moments and simple harmonic motion.

My college did a session on a Friday lunch time where they paired us up and gave us a list of some standard questions and some exams problems. They offered to arrange mock interviews over the next week if people were interested which I would have been, had my interview not been on the following Monday and Tuesday.

One of the things that I found really helpful was talking to other people while I was there. There was a group of us who went back to the JCR after our dinner and played card games for a few hours and it really helped distract me and calm me down.