Written by Jules, who is a chemistry teacher at one of the best independent schools in the UK, and who has been preparing students for Oxbridge success or 20 years.

Over many years I’ve been lucky enough to work with a wide range of students who have aspirations of studying at the very best UK universities in Chemistry or related courses such as Natural Sciences. It’s perfectly natural for students who are very academically able to want to study at Oxford or Cambridge, but there’s a big difference in preparation between the students that are successful and those that fall short, either not getting to interview or not achieving an offer once they’ve got to interview. I think the most important thing that students need to demonstrate is a passion towards Chemistry and an attitude towards challenge and pushing themselves further than the course content taught in their academic classes. Where they’ve been at their best during practice interviews is when I asked them questions that are really challenging, or beyond the scope of the course, and they give off an impression of interest and excitement and a willingness to get stuck in. At their worst, their approach is to feel that that’s an unfair question because they “haven’t been taught that material”.

What might their preparation look like? Start by asking questions about subjects not otherwise covered in the regular course content. For example, think about the lanthanides and actinides – why are they down the bottom of the periodic table? Can other elements exhibit optical isomerism other than carbon? How does nature use naturally occurring molecules to make modern drugs such as Ozempic? How can we understand reaction kinetics where there this more than one way to get to the product? Or, you might ask how does Molecular Orbital theory help explain how bonds break or how does the bonding in Ferrocene work? All these have interesting angles that we can show to aspirational students but none of these would feature on any exams.

When they get to interview the biggest skill they can have is to remain open-minded enough that when they are asked something difficult by academics that they are able to demonstrate their grasp of the question well enough to solve a problem. Their level of ability in the course itself can, to be certain, assessed externally;  A* at A-level (or 7 in IB) demonstrates that the students can do the specification content. But in the interview, top universities are looking for something a little bit more special.

To maximise their chances of a successful interview and securing an offer, the most important thing for a student is to start preparing early. You can’t decide in October of your final year that you want to be a viable candidate in two months’ time in an interview at Oxbridge. If it isn’t something that you have been independently working on for at least a year then probably that is not the correct course or institution for you. So starting early by reading around the course and challenging yourself with difficult questions is a brilliant way to get going. Take a part of the course, such as those we discussed above, that you find interesting and just try and read a little bit further. Try and find an interesting context or find an example where the theory that you’ve been taught in your course needs to be expanded to explain more complex phenomena.

This is where I think it is sometimes difficult for students. To get access to those questions that really test them but are reasonable for them at the stage that they’re at in their journey is not often easy and can be time very time consuming. Experienced teachers are often helpful here. The UK has a fantastic Chemistry Olympiad for which the past papers are all available. But it’s designed to be challenging for a student in January of their Upper 6^th. If you’re sitting that in January of your Lower 6^th year, it’s going to be pretty tough. The questions I ask my students when preparing them for the Oxbridge journey early on are slightly simpler and specific to the content that I know that they’ve covered. There are also some other Lower 6^th competitions or essay prizes and there’s a good one run by Cambridge University called C₃L₆ designed for students at the end of their Lower 6^th year. So it’s slightly easier content, but again, applying questions in complex (and often amusing) situations and that push students to think about a topic in a way that goes beyond the specification of the A-level or IB courses.

All students interested in applying to top UK universities in Chemistry should enter the C₃L₆ in June of Lower 6^th and the Chemistry Olympiad in January of Upper 6^th. There are a variety of other essay competitions that can also be entered, which students can take advantage of. Please note that while the Chemistry Olympiad is available to students in much of the world, the C₃L₆ is for UK students only. Here is a link to another competition accessible to students outside the UK: http://ichto.org/en/. It is a slightly different style in that it is a team competition as opposed to individual.

So let’s say you’ve done all that. You started some wider reading at the beginning of your Lower 6^th course. You’ve entered the competitions that are available to you. You’ve enjoyed the challenge of some practice questions. How can you maximise your success when it comes to the interview? The first thing is to know your content. There’s nothing worse than when they try and give you an introductory question that’s based on standard content that they know every single Sixth form student will have studied and you trip up. There’s no point knowing about some really advanced undergraduate content if you can’t answer the easy questions. And I think some students often get their head in the clouds looking at complicated content and yet they haven’t got a really reliable core body of knowledge of the fundamental topics that make up every single UK course, either from the A-Levels or IB. So you should, by interview time, (normally December of the U6 year) be pretty solid on the vast majority of the taught course, and students often read ahead so that they won’t miss out if their school has taught topics in a different order.

The second thing is Maths. Almost all A level students and certainly all IB students will study maths and most of them who are applying to an Oxbridge course will study Further Maths or HL Maths (Analysis and Approaches) as well. And the reason is because Maths is absolutely fundamental to success at Chemistry. It’s mandated in an A level exam that 30% of the questions are Maths based and most universities, if you go to read Chemistry, will require you to sit some sort of Maths course alongside your Chemistry modules and especially so if you haven’t done double Maths. So Maths should be comfortable to you and you should be nimble working on paper to rearrange equations with ease. I think this is something that students often overlook because they feel like they’re going to a Chemistry assessment and they won’t be asked questions on Maths.

The final thing that I would say students need to prepare for is for questions to be hard. If they haven’t found a question that you didn’t know how to answer, how do they know the limit of your understanding? I always feel far more confident about a student who returns from an interview saying it was really tough and they really asked them difficult questions than someone who says it was quite straightforward. The harder the questions you get asked, the better, in my book. I always think it’s a compliment to the candidate that the person asking the question feels that the candidate is capable of those tough questions and they’re giving them a really good grilling on some difficult stuff. But that’s often a very different experience to a student’s experience in the classroom when questions are much warmer and often much easier. Sometimes that takes students back slightly, and they feel they’re under attack. They’re not; they’re just being academically challenged with rigorous, tough questions.

So certainly practice interviews are very useful especially with people that you don’t know. I think it’s difficult to do a practice interview with a student that you teach or you have taught very regularly for two years because they’re much more comfortable with you and it doesn’t replicate exactly the same interview environment. So when we do our practice interviews, we always swap teachers around so that a teacher is never giving an interview to a student that they teach themselves.

All that being said, it is always an imperfect system and good students will get missed, and vice versa. and a truly dedicated applicant may take a year out and apply after their qualifications, often with an improved chance of success having secured those top grades. The other good news is that if you are dedicated to studying Chemistry, then all the work that is done in preparing for this process should a) help you secure top grades, b) confirm that you’ve chosen the right course and c) often be an enjoyable process! Good luck!