Official Oxford Applicants 2015 Entry, including Interview Chat

I'll let TLG find her way to this post and sell you on Woosta

In terms of size, I'd want it to be large and diverse. I'd like to be close to the center though. I'd prefer more modern accommodation, and bigger rooms and stuff (Not really sure about the whole prices thing). With all of these though, I really could sacrifice them had I got in... I don't mind, I just want to pick the right one that I stand a good chance at.

I'm an international student applying this year for Maths and CompSci at Oxford. Here's a glimpse of my record:
CIE O'Levels: 10 A*s and 1 Outstanding Learner Award
A Levels: A*AAA in Mathematics (A2), Physics, Chemistry, Computing (AS) with A's in all modules. CIE doesn't offer Further Mathematics at AS so I'll be taking FM this year.
Other relevant activities: Top positions in national maths competitions, wide reading beyond A'level curriculum, several online maths courses from MIT's OpenCourseWare, Harvard's CS50, voluntary work at a local NGO.
So, what are my chances of getting an offer provided I do reasonably well on MAT?

Course: Computer Science
College: St John's

We don't have anything like GCSEs or A Levels here. We get yearly grades and sit a final exam, so I think these will do just fine for the purpose of this thread.

Last year grades:
10/10 Informatics
10/10 Network systems
10/10 technology and design of computer systems and telecommunications
8/10 maths (even with a perfect test you can't get more than that with my math teacher. It sucks, but it's how it works here. Hope this won't lower my chances)
other >=8/10 marks in non - relevant subjects

Predicted result for the "Esame di Maturità": 100/100

Anything else relevant:
2nd place in regional Informatics Olympiad, didn't score well at the national one but I'll try again this year (before the application )
1st place at School's math competition
Worked on various small projects
Student representative in the school's administrative board for years
Vicepresident of the Provincial Student's Council

International Candidate from Italy

A little update! I just came back from the OII (Italian Olympiad in Informatics) and I got a Silver medal (23 points off gold :/ but at least I'm first within the Silvers). Thanks to this, I've been invited to the Training Camp for the IOI 2015. If it goes well, I may be part of the Italian IOI 2015 team Now it's time to write my PS

Holy **** you guys start your selection early!

Well it's not that early actually... IOI 2015 is in only 10 months from now

Haha it's extremely early compared to India.

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What happens if your referee writes you a bad reference? with bad I mean that the reference is short and not descriptive in an adequate manner?

x

The next best for you might be St. John's, which has a nice location and is very rich (so accommodation and food is the cheapest in Oxford). Come to think of it, you might like it more than Worcester...Anyhow I'll leave it to fluteflute to convince you of that http://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/357/Accommodation-and-Meals.html

My application was sent to UCAS yesterday (internal college deadline). So now I'm waiting for my college to send off my reference and then it's the MAT in November!

I should have gone to Oxford open day gaaaaaah

What am I doing with my life

You can go pretty much any day and they'll let you look around


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This is my plan

Apply Cambridge

If rejected, visit Oxford and if I do really well on results day apply post a level there

Out of curiosity, why not reapply to Cambridge if that's your first choice?

This is my plan

Apply Cambridge

If rejected, visit Oxford and if I do really well on results day apply post a level there

But seriously, visiting Oxford won't be a problem. I couldn't make it to their open day and the colleges were ridiculously helpful. Even if you end up applying for Cambridge, at least you won't be thinking "I could have applied to Oxford".