Medicine @ Gonville & Caius, Cambridge in 2018

Interview format

BMAT; 3x interviews

Interview content

Interview 1: Personal statement, work experience; Interview 2: School reference, activities, problem and diagram; Interview 3: Personal statement, social side of medicine.

Best preparation

Went over personal statement in detail

Advice in hindsight

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Final thoughts

They want to see your human side.

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: Biomedical Admissions Test (BMAT)

Number of interviews: 3

Skype interview: No

Time between interviews: Around an hour

Length of first interview: 20 minutes; Length of second interview: 20 minutes; Length of third interview: 20 minutes

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

The first interview used my personal statement and took something I wrote about my hospital work experience and went deeper into the science behind it. The second interview used my school reference and asked me about my leadership and teamwork activities. Then they gave me a problem to solve and I had to draw out a diagram. The third interview used my personal statement and was more about myself as a person and the social side of medicine. Each interview got progressively more relaxed!

How did you prepare?

I took my personal statement and highlighted everything they could ask me about at interview. One by one I went through these points and practiced talking about them. I also came up with questions that they could ask me based on these points. This was the most useful thing I did!

What was less useful, in my experience, was trying to memorise difficult science facts about things in my statement or questions I had seen online. There's no point trying to memorise anything - they are far more interested in what you can figure out on the spot than what you can regurgitate.

What advice do you have for future applicants?

Looking back, what advice would you give to your past self?

I'd expected them to continuously throw really hard science problems at me. This was not the case. If you've got to interview stage, they already know you're smart. For a course like medicine, they want to see the human side of you as well.