The Interview

the Cambridge interview process is very important to see this is one part of the assessment so we look at many things about each candidate in our minds when we're doing an interview the sorts of things we're thinking about are whether or not the person in front of us has the right kind of background knowledge needed for our courses whether we think they'd be successful in our kind of teaching environment and to put it in a nutshell really can they think hello hello hi take a seat hi I'm Nick because hello there and just as we start this interview I want to give you a bit of an outline of what's going to come next and so we're going to start off with a question from Nick and then we're going to talk a little bit about some unseen material at the end of the interview there'll be some time for you to ask any questions if you have any you don't have to have any if there's anything that we say that does it make sense or that you'd like us to repeat or rephrase please do just say we're more than happy to do that okay and we will make notes as we go along as well please don't be throwing up okay you shouldn't be surprised to find those interviewing you are taking notes during the interviews this is because they need to remind themselves of topics which have been covered but during and in subsequent discussion of the interview performance what we're expecting out of students in those interviews is firstly that they are listening really carefully to what they're being asked and we're interested to find out how people are thinking so in their responses if they can take us through their own thought processes then that's great because it means that we can see how they're exploring those ideas we'll start off and have it by talking to you about the essays that you've sent in and then we'll move on to one or two other topics that come out of your personal statement as as the interview goes on in one of your essays you were talking about the theory of functionalism that things are kind of for purpose and in your archeological or anthropological reading have you come across that as an idea as a sort of a school of thought oh yeah I've definitely come across that idea comes across a lot actually and there's definitely inter linkage between sociology and especially social anthropology and the idea like the but like Society works as a body through the organs it's not necessarily something I believe in I don't think the problem with these kind of broad theories that is they generalize too much I think and there are too many exceptions in the arts and social sciences we will often make use of a student's UK's personal statement and they're supplementary questionnaire that they fill in specifically for Cambridge we're not evaluating the quality of their writing in the statement we're asking them to say some more about things they have told us about themselves about their extracurricular academic engagement and about their interest in the subject that they want to read and Harrod I was interested in your personal statement you mention archaeology and that you've been doing some things in that field after you've finished a levels can you tell me a little bit about what you've been doing and how you've been exploring that that area I think with archaeology have been trying to build up a board not like a basic kind of foundation knowledge because I've never studied it my interest started and in programs about Egyptology and seeing exhibitions of that of that sort in place at the British Museum that kind of sparked my interest so I wanted to try and understand that more Canadian introductory book for a technical interview like Natural Sciences or engineering or mathematics then what we're looking for is how teachable they are we're looking at how interested in the material they are how they can take an idea and develop that even if it's something that they perhaps haven't necessarily seen before so it's going to start by sketching a function and the function that I'm going to write down you've probably not seen before I'm fairly sure that you all seen the pieces of that function thank you so if I write down function is y is equal to sine X divided by X okay and what I would like you to do is sketch the behavior of that function between -2 PI and 2 pi and so if you can sketch some axes for me and give that a go first of all I'm going to start and get some of the main points that I need to mm-hmm work out so I'm going to start with X is equal to 0 okay so if I can just stop you there for a second because X is equal to 0 is a little bit tricky so choosing some points is a good idea absolutely but we might just come back to that one so are there any other points that you know the values of pi is it a good one okay um so sine of pi will be 0 and so zero divided by pi is 0 mm-hmm excellent even when she was getting to the stage of being uncertain about what to draw and you could see the hesitation she would nevertheless draw something and that gave the opportunity to say well yes that's sort of in the right direction you need to change this a little bit so that would be yeah yeah have a scribble different helps what was this one that was 2/3 mm-hmm what's this one that's minus 2/3 of Pi oh yeah so that'll be more like minus 2/9 yeah get to be a lot smaller if candidates are very hesitant and very unwilling to write things down or say things it's very difficult for us to help them so keeping the dialogue going is very very important and I think Hannah was very good at that the questions we ask interview are designed to push the candidates and to make them think card what you hope to do is to start with something which they will be able to answer but to get progressively more difficult as you go through the problem and often the candidate who thinks they haven't done very well will have done well because they'll have actually progressed further through the problem we would expect candidates by the end of the interview to feel that there was something that they haven't been able to answer starting with something that hopefully we've already covered in something when you should know what role do bases actually play in the hereditary nature of DNA so a triplet code so three bases together code for one amino acid and then different combinations of those codons in DNA build up a chain of amino acids and code for proteins okay so why is it three why is it was a codon made up of three bases one because you're not the three bases are needed so he can have different combinations to code for different amino acids there's only four basis so if you only had a single base you would emigrate to code for four I mean asses whereas we have a triplet code which goes for twenty different amino acids is it twenty how many combinations can you have with with three dry something down yes so Oliver gave a very positive interview actually I think he answered the questions very well what I particularly liked was that he didn't give up he kept on trying to work out answers and he was listening to the information that were giving him and you'd see flashes every so often ago of course that's that I've connected it together have made that's exactly the kind of thing that I'd be looking for well let's think about this if you have one I mean one base sorry you can obviously code for as you said for different amino acids right so you can a tgz if you know how to what's the combination so far 12 what I have bit more than 12 I'd have a 1a right so I could have 16 16 oh yeah so when you have a triplet what can you get um so I've now got 64 64 yeah so can 64 code for 28 could code for 64 different every night so do up to 6 a whole potential you couldn't it yeah it can be quite difficult I think when you come into an interview situation to remember that we want you to do well so if you can take a moment to gather your thoughts and make sure that you understand the question that's being asked of you and what you want to say in response to that you look as though you've kind of got a sense of what it is that you're trying to say in response to the questions and I think Natalie's handled that really well she took a few moments to reflect and she thought about the kinds of things that she was interested in without ever dodging the question she always talks about relevant material but she did it in a way that I think allowed her to express her own interest in the subject this shows you total fertility rates by nuts to regions in Europe and it's average between 2006 and 2008 okay I just want to start off really by asking you if you could describe the pattern that you see there so I can see that in West Europe this jersey rates are generally high well higher within each country there's variation so why do you think the patterns might look the way they do particularly in Western Europe which you identified immediately I say cultural factors say quite a big role so the expectations' of how big families could be and also maybe welfare measures will say they're also the provisions of the state and how that it may encourage or discourage people to bring up thighs I wonder if I could ask you to speculate on what you think this map of total fertility rates will look like in 20 years time I would say the possibly the fertility rates in the UK and France might decline a little bit and we might that be that might be to do with the changing role of women so their expectations of their careers and I suppose it is quite difficult to say because there are so many factors that sort of come into it that you can't really speculate that much until you until it happens okay it's a big complicated picture thank you very much as we run a holistic admissions process so we try and collect as much information as we can about a candidate a lot of that comes from the paper records a record of examinations for example the personal statement the reference and the school the interview is just one component of that whole process it's not the bill on the end or it can tell us important information about our candidate but it's not necessarily the most important factor in our considerations the single piece of advice I'd give any student coming for interview is to listen carefully to the questions that they're being asked and if you don't understand a word ask for clarification be yourself as much as possible we are assessing you to see whether we can teach you effectively so the more you are like you and your interview the better you

Channel: Cambridge University

Views: 2,038,165

Rating: 4.9515729 out of 5

Keywords: University Of Cambridge (College/University), Interview, Mock Interview, Cambridge Interview, interview process, interview experience

Id: dUwN6GI-0EQ

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 28 2014