Before your interview

Have I been shortlisted?

Towards the end of November or in early December you will receive an email or a letter indicating whether or not you have been invited for interview. Please note you may not receive this email or letter until a week before the interviews are due to take place. If you have been invited, the letter will include practical details of your interview and further information.

Please note that you will probably be interviewed at the college to which you applied, or the college to which you were allocated, if you made an open application. However, in some cases your application may be referred to another college. This can happen if a college is significantly oversubscribed for your subject that year, and will be made clear in the letter inviting you to interview. In some subjects all candidates will automatically be interviewed at a second college. For other subjects, you may be offered the opportunity to have an interview at a second or even a third college. This does not necessarily mean that you will not be offered a place at the first college.

How can I prepare?

We recommend that you:

• think about some basic questions that may be asked at the beginning of an interview and how you might answer them. For example, tutors may ask why you have chosen this particular subject, and why you want to study it at Oxford. Whether the tutors ask you these questions or not, it is still a good idea to bear in mind your motivation for studying your course.
• read widely around your chosen subject, including newspaper articles, websites, journals, magazines and other publications that relate to your subject.
• take a critical view of ideas and arguments that you encounter at school or college, or in the media – think about all sides of any debate.
• be prepared to show some background knowledge of the subject, if you are applying for a course not normally studied at school or college, such as Medicine, Law, Biochemistry or Oriental Studies. However, you will not be expected to have a detailed understanding of specific or technical topics. For example, you may be asked what role your subject plays in society.  For these subjects, the topics for discussion are likely to allow you to demonstrate the skills needed by an undergraduate: the ability to use information to construct your own opinions, the willingness and ability to analyse and, in the sciences and mathematics, facility in problem-solving.
• re-read any written work that you have submitted, and think about how you might expand on what you wrote.
• re-read your personal statement.
• organise a practice interview for yourself. This could be with a teacher or someone else who is familiar with your subject, but preferably not someone you know very well. This will help you to get some more experience of talking about yourself and your work in an unfamiliar environment.
• remind yourself of the selection criteria for your chosen subject.
  

Finding your way

For details of how to get to Oxford and how to find your college please see the University's maps and directions page. Interviews in Oxford take place in December, after the end of term, when many students will have returned home for Christmas. However, each college makes sure that there are plenty of undergraduates around to provide information and to help candidates find their way around. These undergraduates will have recently experienced the interview process themselves, and are very well placed to help and advise you. 

What to wear and what to bring 

Please wear whatever clothes you feel comfortable in. Most tutors will not dress formally, and it is not necessary for you to do so. We recommend that you bring copies of any written work you have submitted, and a copy of your personal statement, as tutors may refer to these during your interview.

It’s a good idea to bring a book with you or some school or college work to do, as you will only spend a relatively small amount of your time in Oxford actually in interviews or taking tests. There will also be plenty of opportunity to spend time with other interview candidates as well as current undergraduates.

You will need to bring your own personal items such as toiletries, but your accommodation and meals will be provided free-of-charge by the college. It is advisable that you bring a mobile telephone, along with its charger, so that the college can contact you, if they need to.