OPHS Experiences

My name is Fariha Ahmmed and I take Maths, Further Maths and Economics, hoping to read Economics at Cambridge.

There’s not one reason why I applied to Cambridge, but a lot of small things I liked about the university, pushed me to apply. For example looking at the actual Economics course I was really interested in the topics and modules they study there, as well as the fact when I visited Cambridge on an open day I really liked the whole atmosphere of the university. The fact that Cambridge have supervisions unlike other universities, which is like having discussions about your subjects within small groups with students and lecturers, sounded really interesting to me.

The whole application process is very challenging, but what I think I really struggled with is mainly revising for the entrance exams (ECAA) and also preparing for my interviews, as I had two sets of interviews as I got pooled for the second. For starters there are very few practice and past papers available for the ECAA, therefore it’s important not to use them up. On top of that the exam is in October, so it was quite challenging balancing school work at the start of year 13 and revising for this test at the same time. I made a timetable to balance my time between the two and once I revised the main topics that would help in the ECAA I started doing the past papers at the end.

In terms of the interview I think the school played a major part in this, as we had the opportunity to do mock interviews with teachers that had experience with your subject. This helped as practicing content for the interview is not as bad as actually engaging in a conversation about your subject, so doing a practice interview made it less nerve wracking for the main one.

Overall I think the school and teachers really encouraged us to try our best. Whenever I needed personal statement help my head of year and subject teachers were really happy to look over it for me. In terms of the whole application process Miss Willson also helped a lot when it came to sticking to strict deadlines and checking over everything when applying, as well as setting up talks from external people about applying to oxbridge, which were really helpful.