Getting into Oxbridge

Most of the advice out there on getting into Oxbridge is wrong. People spend months padding personal statements, chasing prestige work experience, obsessing over the “perfect” set of A-levels. Almost none of that actually decides it. The thing they're testing for, when you strip everything else away, is whether you can think. That's it.

The interview is the whole game. The personal statement gets you to the door. The grades get you to the door. The interview is where you actually have to perform, and what they care about is depth of thought, not breadth of knowledge.

So the actual prep is supercurriculars. Read outside the syllabus. For medicine that means BMJ articles, papers, anything where you're forming an opinion instead of memorising a fact. Practice Fermi questions. Watch interview reconstructions on YouTube. Listen to podcasts in your field and outside it. Play chess. The point isn't to know more things, it's to expose yourself to enough different ways of thinking that you start to recognise them in yourself.

Here's an example I always come back to. There's a classic Oxbridge interview prompt: “You see a frog with three eyes. What might be the purpose of the third eye?” Almost every candidate reaches for survival advantage, better predator detection, wider field of view, whatever. The more interesting answer is the opposite. The third eye might be useless. If it confers no disadvantage either, there's no selection pressure against it, and it can persist purely through genetic drift. That isn't the “right” answer, but it shows you can think laterally, and that's what they're actually grading.

The way you say it matters too, and people don't talk about this enough. I grew up in East London. The default register of how my friends and I spoke at sixteen wasn't the register that lands well in an Oxbridge interview, and pretending otherwise is naive. You don't have to lose your accent or your roots, but you do have to be able to switch. Speak clearly, structure your thoughts in real time, sound like you've actually considered what you're saying.

The only way to get good at this is by doing it. Talk to anyone who will listen. Talk to people who think differently from you. Listen to people who articulate ideas well and quietly steal their patterns. There are apps and podcasts specifically for this if you want a more structured route, but the cheap version is just deliberate practice.

One more box you have to tick: the admissions test. For medicine that's the UCAT now, and the BMAT before it was retired. For other subjects it'll be whatever the equivalent is for your year, the MAT, the ESAT, the TSA, the LNAT. You do need to do well on these. The test is a baseline, and a real one. But it's also just a baseline. I've watched people with near-perfect admissions test scores get rejected at interview, and people who scored merely above the threshold get in because their interview was outstanding. The test gets you to the interview. The interview is what actually decides it. Treat the admissions test like grades: clear the bar efficiently, then stop thinking about it.

Grades matter, obviously, but they're a filter, not a differentiator. Get the A*s (separate article for how) and then stop thinking about them. The interview is the part everyone underestimates and the part that actually decides it.

One more thing, and I want you to take this seriously. Your generation has access to tools that mine didn't, frontier AI models that can compress months of revision into weeks, tutor you at 2am, and explain anything in any framing you like. Use them ruthlessly. The students who treat AI as a calculator for thinking are going to leave everyone else behind.

Use the time AI saves you on the things that actually compound. The vast majority of Oxbridge applicants come off the same corporate conveyor belt: same hospital volunteering, same MUN, same hand-me-down personal statement angles. If you've done something genuinely your own, lean into it. That might be starting something, running something, learning a subject nobody asked you to learn, taking a real risk with your time, building something and putting it out there. Whatever it is, very few sixteen-year-olds have done it. Initiative at that age is rare. A* grades used to be a USP. They're table stakes now. The applicants who stand out at Oxbridge in 2026 are the ones who took some agency early.