Can I get into Oxford University? || Oxford Interview

this episode was sponsored by morningbrew start your day by catching up on business finance and tech in just five minutes the link is down below last time i was at oxford university i sat the entrance exam to study undergrad mathematics at st edmond hall oxford university and scored horrendously however with some help from dr tom crawford we managed to swap my score up from 37 to 61 in two days of studying which would hopefully just be high enough to bag me an interview well now it's time to see if i would actually be accepted by the university i'm going to be interviewed by two colleagues of toms who actually conduct the interviews at st edmond hall and they're going to tell me what they think however the first thing that we're going to do is do a mock interview with tom just to gauge where i'm at and to see what's involved i'll tell you how i feel about this so i have an air of confidence about this one because i'm quite good at interviews i i'm only going on job interviews i think i'm gonna be okay so should we just fire straight into like a mock interview now see how we get on let's do it cool hi mike i am dr tom crawford and i'll be conducting your interview today so do you have any questions about the the setup because i'm just about to dive in with some maths are you um happy at this point can i ask you if i'm stuck or is it just no that's absolutely fine if you get stuck i'm more than happy to offer hints and stuff yeah we're gonna be working through these problems together and what we want to do is to create a cylindrical tin and we want to make our tin have the smallest surface area possible so i do i want something really tall and thin or do i want something really short and fat are two possible things which could have the same volume we want to work out what is the ideal size of our cylinder containing our cat food to minimize the surface area immediately i knew i was in trouble there was no asking why are you applying for this role tell me your weaknesses or what are your hobbies outside of work none of that pointless crap that they usually ask you in job interviews because this wasn't a job interview tom just got down to it straight away and it became apparent quickly they didn't care what it looked like what i was wearing what i did at the weekends the only thing tom cares about here is am i a good mathematician which is both terrifying and comforting in a way we'll need at least at the very minimum to have an equation for the surface area of the tin get that the answer is that the the height it should basically be like a square okay we'll see yeah see um r cubed is equal to performance or is it good or bad i mean you can tell you have to matter a while how come i can get five with four but only three with three that makes no sense okay for all the maths nerds out there here's one of the questions tom asked me if you make n cuts in a pizza what is the maximum number of pieces you can get for just one cup it's clearly just two pieces but for two cuts you could get four pieces for three cuts you can get as many as seven pieces you need to find a general formula for the number of cuts n that gives the maximum number of pieces and if it makes you feel any better tom had to hold my hand all the way through this one so how did i get on what do you think how'd it go it's like i thought it went pretty well like if i if i walked out there i would be like yeah uh start looking for accommodation um it's very obvious that mike hasn't done any maths for a while i would say is is the main takeaway i got from that so i think overall you know it was kind of distinctly average i would say in terms of the total performance so i genuinely can't say if mike would get in off the back of that performance but i think what we can say is i would be looking for a very strong test score if that was the interview performance i think it's just a little bit below the borderline so if we're saying that your board lines are six or seven i think that's probably like a five all right not great the question is can you improve at technical interviews like this is this a skill you can actually learn can i improve in just two days tom has a plan we've got some work to do right before my real interview i think so okay it's not all bad news but yes we we are gonna have to i'm gonna have to work you hard i think i've broken it down into four four step plan to help you pass this interview so i think the absolute basics are gonna be to brush up your math skills right it's quite clear you haven't mastered a while we can start with the syllabus everything you're expected to know for the admissions test you're definitely going to need to know for the interview so we can just work through that like tick tick tick yep get you fluent with maths again that makes sense we're going to look at logical thinking yeah so what i mean here is given a certain statement can you interpret it correctly we're then going to go on to i guess general tips for getting stuck so i'm the interviewer again is designed for you to get stuck we want to know how you overcome those struggles so obviously working on general techniques of one-time stock what do i do and then the last thing is something that i tend to use a lot in the interviews i do is about looking at how you absorb new knowledge so i'm going to teach you something very quickly you've never seen before and i do not in any way expect you to know i want you to absorb it quickly and then immediately be able to use it and these are things that people can actually work on absolutely yeah it's sort of these are what i would say are like general tips and techniques of being a good mathematician yeah so first things first we have to brush up on the syllabus you have to know the basics this information is published and easy to find online so at a minimum you should know all of this stuff as a note this is all high school level stuff so for me it's more of a case of dusting off the old cobwebs rather than learning it for the first time okay so this is the syllabus that's published online um at a minimum i should know all this stuff so for the entirety of the first day we just brushed up on my high school mathematics for the third time plus 16x get your answer by [Music] okay it is day two uh we're just gonna do more more of the same so we're gonna work our way through this question and i think this will help to train you or give you an idea about possible ways out of what feels like a dead end so you're you're telling me that it's impossible to know everything so you'll never get stuck but there's ways to learn how to deal with being stuck yes yeah yeah there are techniques you can use it's not foolproof but the more examples we look at the more you'll realize oh there was a way out doing this or let's try and think about it in this context let's let's do it okay tom's plan was to improve three aspects of my math skills logical thinking getting unstuck and using new information the way he went about doing this was simple it was a case of doing challenging problems that stressed my math skills over and over tom would push me with questions that deliberately got me stuck where the only way i was through logical reasoning or using the tidbits of information provided it's surprisingly similar to training physically where you train outside your comfort zone in order to improve this is a grueling process that saps at your energy and really i could have used a few extra days of this and i know i know your brain's fried but i think look at all this [Laughter] this is what we've done just today just like pages and pages pages of work okay yes my brain is fried all right you know you've got this i have every genuinely every faith in you for this okay uh okay right we're out of time for practicing tomorrow's interview yep uh you feel like a confident teacher i don't i just hope you don't stumble on the rustiness that we yeah we've tried our best to clear that up i think there are certain types of questions i can see you flying through and there are others where that rustiness might yeah even though it won't necessarily affect the interviewer's opinion of you i think it you might allow it to throw you a little bit oh i'm dreading tomorrow genuinely dreading it it doesn't even mean anything to me like i'm not going to oxford especially not after tomorrow it was time let's meet the interviewers so um i'm adele i'm i'm about halfway through a phd at oxford and i teach some of the first year classes um and i've i've interviewed for the admissions interviews uh two years previously i'm oliver i'm a math tutor here at teddy hall um where i've been for a number of years and a professor in the maths department at oxford and so i'm the senior master of teddy hall just like being the longest and the one who organises our admissions interviews small tangent here you get it tangent oliver is quite an interesting chap some of you might remember the eternity puzzle from 1999 a tiling puzzle that offered the first to solve it one million pounds in prize money well oliver and his friend alex selby did it they figured out how to generate a solution and wrote a program to find it and they got the million pounds from a puzzle oliver has a talk on how he did this it's a fascinating watch and it's linked down below right on with the interview [Music] i know this isn't a real interview and i know that i this doesn't matter to me thank you i'm so nervous thank you hi oliver i'm mike nice to meet you but we're just basically going to ask maths questions and that's it so is it okay we just jump in with the first question yeah so suppose i have a function f and it satisfies the following equation that every x f of x plus twice f of one over one minus x is equal to x what is the value of f of three i'm just gonna write this out again just wrap my head around it plus a good idea okay these questions were brutal i know that hindsight is 20 20. however i do understand these questions and i know i can do this but honestly the pressure just got to me my mind was cloudy and i felt scared to write something down feeling it would be laughably wrong adele and oliver had to help me through this more than i would have liked and i was kicking myself afterwards for losing my cool if i could evaluate f at minus a half then i could sort of substitute that in so let's try that yep yep that's correct i'm not actually sure if the number was right or some number went wrong or somewhere but yeah yeah that doesn't matter yeah okay yeah okay hold on okay okay adele's time now which factorization [Music] of 840 gives us the largest sum what well what are all the things uh see it's can you say that again sorry um what you just said is that the question is um do we get a larger contribution by by splitting this number by like splitting this up or by taking it would give 420. they give just this bit right sorry yeah they would go uh can you write down like an algebraic equation yeah you might be interested in so is it like saying a times b you might find it helpful um like to write down maybe an inequality that you want to prove great so you sean what statement here yeah okay yeah okay great well i think that's everything from me yeah are we done thank you okay great so how did i do did i get in i thought it wasn't bad um he's not here it was a bit rusty on some things but so on on my question i like that he sort of actually had ideas so thought of trying to find a point where you get these two things the same so you get an equation in terms of yourself maybe the weakest thing was just sort of like keeping track of the the big picture that we've got down into all these little details and then it was why were we doing this and where are we trying to go which is yeah um because i guess it didn't feel like in this that i mean i was sort of got like giving a lot of hints yeah yeah and um and that's i mean i mean that's fine but often you want them to be able to like take those ideas and absorb them and sort of really understand what's going on so that's sort of why i was asking towards the end what are we trying to prove here to sort of check how much that how how how much he was just sort of doing what i seem to be suggesting and how much he was sort of comprehending what's going on so maybe not so great um i think it's borderline as uh i would say yeah it just came out as well [Music] borderline so you're saying there's a chance to be honest i'll take that despite my performance not being great it did actually improve from my mock interview so this is a skill you can work on you can obviously learn the syllabus but you can also learn how to get unstuck how to use the information that interviewers give to you how to think logically on the spot it's just a case of practice just like everything else this episode was sponsored by morningbrew morningbrew is a daily newsletter that brings you up to speed with business finance and tech and it's designed to be read in just five minutes it prevents me doing that horrendous endless twitter scroll in the morning that leaves me feeling enraged and deflated and instead gets me informed quickly for example today i skimmed through the markets which are going nuts the tech news and learned that the us senate has passed the sunshine protection act which aims to make daylight saving time permanent but that's unlikely that the bill will pass the house morning brew arrives as an email in your inbox each morning it's very condensed and written very well and it's designed to get to the point quickly but without glossing over the important details if you're tired of the dry bland manner in which traditional outlets cover the news this is perfect as it's written in a really witty style but best of all it's 100 free and there's no installation it's not an app it works in your browser or in your email app and it takes less than 15 seconds to 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Channel: Mike Boyd

Views: 609,945

Keywords: oxford, interview, college, math, maths, university

Id: qxM7Dr5iPWA

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022