What should I expect from a Biology interview at Oxford

First, you must remember that one of the main purposes of Oxbridge interviews, aside from seeing whether you would cope with the academic standard, is as an opportunity for the tutor to assess your character, the way you face problems and to see if you are a candidate they would want to teach for the next 3/4 years! My tutor said in a group meeting before the interviews that the best preparation you could do for the interview was the 18 years of your life you have been living. So the cliché 'be yourself ' really does stand. The interviews differ from college to college and you will always receive at least two interviews at different colleges and some colleges may give you two (so that's a minimum of 2 and maximum of 4). Often tutors will begin or end with questions relating to your personal statement. These should be comfortable questions and give you an opportunity to show off what interests you in your subject, but make sure you know what you wrote and that you actually did what you said! Then the main bulk of the interview will be the tutor pushing you beyond your prior knowledge and seeing how you cope with taking on and processing new information. For this section they want to see that you can think through a problem in a logical manner, so don’t be afraid to be wrong! They will give you hints along the way and they are then looking for how you take on this new knowledge and assimilate it with your previous logic. If at this point you realise you were wrong before, it is fine to say ‘Oh, considering that bit of information I guess it can’t be like I thought, but maybe it is like this instead’. This could be done in practice in several ways; one common interview technique is to present you with an object, for example a cast deer antler. At this point they are not looking for you to say ‘this is a resin cast of a mature male red deer Cervus elaphus’ – they don’t expect prior knowledge! Rather they would want you to say how you believe it is an antler, that you expect it is used for defence against others of the same species in battles which could be over territory or over a mate, perhaps they could also be used in defending young, or themselves, against other predators. From this you may then want to comment on why it looks the way it does, for example is it branched, is it long, and why it would be caused to be branched or long. This may lead you (and they will prompt the discussion, so don’t panic!!) to talk about selection pressures that may have led to these traits being displayed when the cost of making huge head protrusions may otherwise seem expensive and unnecessary. Here you could talk about natural selection and the survival of the fittest – the longer the antler the further away the combatting deer is held, so the further away from danger you are, but also you could introduce ideas of sexual selection if you believe the antlers to be used as a display of dominance. The discussion may then be led into thinking about the mechanisms of evolution and you can begin to see the progression of where the question might go. Otherwise they may give you a scientific article/paper to read and ask you to summarise (‘How would you explain this to your grandma?’ is a question I was asked). Then they may present you with graphs relating to this new information you have been given and ask you to explain what you think they might describe. Other questions they may ask you are things like how would you differentiate between three different cellular molecules (say DNA, protein and carbohydrate), but always they are giving you information and asking you to work around it – not testing how much you know!! They aren’t looking to trip you up, but are looking to see how your brain works and if they can put up with teaching you! SO… don’t panic – don’t be afraid to be wrong (or controversial!) and remember to think outside the box!