History @ Newnham, Cambridge in 2019

Interview format

Arts-Humanities Admissions Assessment (AHAA); 2x interviews.

Interview content

Interview 1: discussion of a submitted essay and EPQ; Interview 2: discussion of a painting.

Best preparation

Doing readings around the course; going over the personal statement.

Final thoughts

Show your passion and your ability to think carefully about the questions posed.

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.

Interview Format

Test taken: Arts-Humanities Admissions Assessment (AHAA)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 3 hours
Length of interviews: about 30 minutes
Online interview: No

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

In my first interview they asked me about the essay I had submitted and mainly focused on that and my EPQ ,which was on women's suffrage. I didn't actually get asked about anything else on my personal statement. The interviewers were warm and friendly but by the end of the first one I did feel I'd messed up as one of the interviewers pointed out an obvious answer that I hadn't been able to reach.

I felt more confident by my second interview but I found it harder. They asked me to explain a painting in the context of its history and I felt quite overwhelmed and stumped because I don't know anything about art but the interviewers encouraged me and gave me time to think.

How did you prepare for your interviews?

I read more around my course outside of just textbooks, and I mainly went back through my personal statement the night before and the morning of my interview and made sure I had notes for the books I mentioned in the statement, etc.

In reality though, on the day of the interviews, there's little you can do, otherwise you will work yourself up. At Newnham they had laid out colouring books for us to relax with. Just repeatedly going through your notes is likely to make you stressed, especially if you have a big gap between interviews.

If you took a test, how did you prepare?

I was advised that it's not completely the kind of thing you can prepare for but I did find that researching more into histiography helped me more with different insights

What advice would you give to future applicants?

Don't think that your answers to the questions have to be super complicated or wordy; you don't have to have very specific subject knowledge. You just need to show that you're truly passionate and show that you can think carefully about a question, not just produce the best or most unique answer.