United Kingdom

 Independent – selective

 yes (3 A*,5 A,2 B)


(A at AS; predicted A; gained NA at A2)




Other universities


Decisions about the application

Best university in the country

oxford doesn’t have step

undying love of maths

an amusing story about some ducks



a few mock interviews which were quite useful.

do as many past interview questions as possible.





It was long! do some past papers. some of it isn’t too hard but its a slightly different style to A level so worth doing some work for it.

miss-read the question in one interview which was a bit embarresing but apart from that it was ok.

On arival i was given a sheet of questions to prepare saying do 2 of these 8. If you get given a sheet you will probably have a whole day and night to answer them so definately worth doing all the questions if you can (even if it says do 2). also they may ask you questions expanding on the origional one so make sure you’re very prepared on the questions you’ve chosen.

sketch a graph of y=x^3 + ax + b
what would be the relationship between a and b in which this curve would have 3 roots, 2 roots, 1 root.

what are the possible remainders when a square number is divided by 4? can the number 4000003 be written as the sum of 2 square numbers

A sector is cut from a circle and a cone is made from the remaining material by pulling the two freshly cut edges together. What should the angle of the sector be in order to maximise the volume of the cone.

shrit, jumper and chinos as i had read this site and most people said don’t wear a suit.


worcester was really nice and i met some really cool people. I tried to stay away form the maths people as after the first few ours i’d already met 8 that were clearly better than me and there were only 9 places. I made friends with the biology crowd and spent most of the time having really long debates.

room was quite large and very old. the stair case was at an angle and the stairs looked like they had had a few hundred years of erosion

delicious, courtesy of J sainsbury who used to go to worcester and so subsidises the food.

Nice, generaly quite friendly. They put me slightly to ease by beggining interviews with asking non maths questions

the seemed nice and helpful. We had subject tea parties which was quite cool.

Final stage

They only took 2 days to get the reply, i was a little nervous.

The letter arrived in the post. If its thin you’ve been rejected or pooled, if its thick, you’re in.

Looking back

yes deffinately. even though i didn’t get in it was a really good experiance and you gain a much wider knowledge of your subject.

make sure you love your subject. make the most of your time there, surrounded by hundreds of really intellegent people from completely different walks of life. Get into as many debates as possible.