ELAT; 2 x interview
Interview 1: Questions based on two poems, a previously submitted essay, and the personal statement; Interview 2: Questions based around the other submitted essay, the personal statement and reading habits
Reading outside of A level
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Be teachable!
Remember this advice isn't official. There is no guarantee it will reflect your experience because university applications can change between years. Check the official Cambridge and Oxford websites for more accurate information on this year's application format and the required tests.
Also, someone else's experience may not reflect your own. Most interviews are more like conversations than tests and like, any conversation, they are quite interactive.
Test taken: English Literature Admissions Test (ELAT)
Number of interviews: 2
Skype interview: no
Time between interviews: none - they were consecutive
Length of first interview: 30 minutes; Length of second interview: 30 minutes
Before the interviews, I was given half an hour to look at two short poems. The first half of the first interview was discussing these two poems - comparing and contrasting - and the interviewers responded to my thoughts and allowed me to shape the discussion. Then we talked about the one of the two essays which I'd submitted and brought in a couple of ideas from my personal statement.
In the second interview we talked about the other essay I had submitted, my reading habits and a couple more things that came up on my personal statement.
Both of these interviews were fairly relaxed and it was totally fine to ask the interviewers to rephrase questions, give me a pointer or even just ask for a couple of seconds to think! It was very much shaped by what I wanted to talk about and wasn't half as intimidating as I thought it would be.
Preparing for the interview and for the admissions process in general was a case of finding a few books outside the A Level course which I really enjoyed and making sure that I was really confident talking about these in an academic context.
I looked at a couple of online resources like thestudentroom but I wish I hadn't, especially before the interview, because people tend to write stuff with a fairly negative framing on these forums and the actual process wasn't negative at all.
A teacher at school also gave me a
The best piece of advice I received for interviews (and I received a LOT, most of it terrible) is to be teachable - if an idea is suggested to you then go with it, think it through and generally be flexible in your approach! This will make it seem like you want to learn from these people - because after all, they will be teaching you for three years.
However, it's also important to have the courage of your convictions - someone told me not to talk about feminism in my interview because some people don't agree with it, but as it's a key part of who I am as a person and in my academic work, I felt it was important to be honest about it - which is always a good policy!