GuruMe www.gurume.co.uk is a network of university undergraduates and graduates who are looking for students to online/offline mentor where one can upload one’s teaching profile directly to the site, e.g. gurume.co.uk/tutor_profiles/45. What questions should we be expecting for Oxford Mathematics Interview?

00:09 Q. Can you tell us about your Oxford Mathematics interviews please?
Jihoon : I remember being really nervous for my interviews. I interviewed at Maudlin College where I had two interviews. Actually I had two more interviews. One at Martin College and one at St Hugh’s which is where I am now. And during these four interviews, I saw many interesting questions. One really interesting question I saw was a question about cubes and the number of varieties a cubes has, well, three dimensions, four dimensions and even higher dimensions and it didn’t stop there. We also discussed how many edges there are in these dimensions and we tried to find a formula for each one of these. I thought it was quite interesting. There were also very hard questions. One particular question I remember is, I was asked to sketch the normal distribution which was like bele curve and I was asked to sketch its derivative by I and its derivative as well so two derivatives. That was easy enough, you just sketch it. And then he asked me do I notice anything about the number of turning points and the number of reeds as we go down. And then noticed that as the differentiate each time the number of reeds and the number of turning points increased by 1 and then the question was given to me “Can you prove that formula is true?” and that was really difficult, I was really stumped at the beginning and actually I didn’t know what to say. But luckily for me, the interviewer he gave me a prompt, he gave me a hint about some theorem that is really useful for this. I immediately managed to use this hint and then go on to answer the question. I thought I was really, really scary at first but really rewarding at the end.
Actually I didn’t get anything about my personal statement in the interview which I thought it wasn’t too strange. I supposed they thought it wasn’t really interesting at the interviews.


02:12 Q. Which aspect during the interview do you think appealed the most to the tutors? Which aspect appealed the most to the tutors?
Jihoon : Well, I think even before the interviews I had ideas that, let me start again.
I think that interviewers really like to see me struggle through the questions because they want to see how I think, they want to see the pressures in which I go about a question. So they would really like giving me difficult questions so that I do struggle with it and they would often give me hints to see if I can cooperate with them, if I do to attend the university.
To prepare for the interviews I kept that in mind. I practiced expressing my thoughts as much as possible. I did this by speaking out loud when I’m by myself answering a math question. I tried to do this whenever I could.


02:57 Q. Tell us about your Oxford mathematics interview preparation please.
Jihoon : Well, I’ve also mentioned that I tried to speak my thoughts as much as possible. Other than that, I was really keen on solving maths BMO questions, (British Maths Olympiad) questions. I feel like that helped out a lot my problem-solving skills. It gave me a good intuition on how to solve questions and I think it made me a better problem-solver all around. I did interview, mock interviews with my teachers, they were quite kind enough to do the sessions with me. They emphasized that I should be speaking my thoughts out as much as possible even when I was struggling to come up with an answer. They encouraged me time and time again to try to give suggestions as how to solve the problem. For example, “maybe we can solve this by induction even though you are not sure how you would do that” and so on. I did these things quite often and I did it about 2 times a week with my teachers, these mock interviews. These other things I’ve mentioned, I tried to keep them on getting in the background as I prepared for my interviews.