The Official Cambridge Applicants for 2025 Entry Thread

Parents, you are free to comment on this thread to provide words of encouragement and guidance to the applicants, but you also have your own thread for parental debates -> https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6325348

Here are a few suggested opening questions, but ask whatever you want regarding Cambridge.

1) What A Levels are you doing (or other eligible qualifications)?
2) What course at Cambridge do you have your eyes on? And why?
3) What grades did you get/are you predicted to get at GCSE?
4) Why Cambridge specifically? and why not Oxford?
5) Which admissions tests do you have to sit, and when will you start preparing for them?
6) What are you doing to help your studies and potentially your application to Cambridge?
7) What do you want to do with your degree from Cambridge?
8) Have you decided which college you're applying to?

NOTE: Unless posting about something particularly sensitive, you are generally expected to post on this thread with your username rather than anonymous, as it makes it easier for contributors to provide guidance to help you through your journey.

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Note: All data you share is at your own risk, the forms and resources linked here are not controlled by The Student Room Group Ltd. If you have any issues, please tag a member of the Universities Volunteer team (in purple and cyan at the bottom of this page). For more information please click here.

hey! i have an offer for english for 2025 so i think i can offer some good advice. the most important thing is doing lots of wider reading, and looking at critical interpretations of texts from academics. try to push yourself by dabbling in some challenging texts that aren’t usually studied at a-level and then try to think of your own perceptive interpretations. when it comes to your personal statement in particular, you should demonstrate an academic journey. so if you read a specific book, what thoughts did that inspire? what did that remind you of? maybe that reminded you of an article you’d read before. following the article, maybe you sought out other non-fiction based on the same topic. then maybe that led you to review a time period which saw a high number of works on this topic.

your preparation so far sounds good, but it’s your interview that will give you a chance to stand out. and you still have a while until then x

Thank you for the advice. May I know which college you have your offer from? What the CELAT was like and how did you prepare? Is there anything you personally did to make a good application?

What are the most LGBTQ+ friendly colleges?

Hii! I am planning on applying to Vet Med and their admission test has been changed to Engineering and Science Admissions Test (ESAT) for the 2025 cycle. Does anyone know where resources can be found to prepare for the test, e.g. exercise/samples/past papers?
Thank you!

Hii! I am planning on applying to Vet Med and their admission test has been changed to Engineering and Science Admissions Test (ESAT) for the 2025 cycle. Does anyone know where resources can be found to prepare for the test, e.g. exercise/samples/past papers?
Thank you!

Hi everyone, I'm Nickname and I'm looking at applying for Cambridge, but I'm not sure that that's where I want to go yet.
Thank you!

The Cambridge course is general for 2 years and then you specialise so there's no worries about trying to decide early what specific engineering you want. Placement year is uncommon but has been done, I knew someone who went to France for the year during his placement.
The new ESAT isn't pass or fail, but neither was the previous engineering test the ENGAA (I imagine the same for the old NatSci test too).
P.s. I am a Cambridge engineering graduate and happy to answer any questions / concerns about anything else regarding the engineering application process + tests

no worries at all! i have an offer from wolfson. i originally applied to clare but was pooled into wolfson since i’m slightly older than the average applicant (not by much, im 20) and wolfson is a mature college.
the CELAT was pretty easy i would say. just your typical unseen poetry/prose close reading essay. the themes can be quite wacky sometimes. i think one time they had dance or something. but the key thing to remember is that, that’s the theme that TIES all the texts together, not the theme you necessarily have to write about. they don’t actively tell you to “analyse the theme of ___”, they just ask you to analyse and compare/contrast two texts in any way you find interesting. so when i did the CELAT, my theme was sleep but the theme that i actually wrote about was death, as the texts i picked used sleep as an allegory for death. so you have a lot of creative freedom. i prepared by doing some ELAT past papers. cambridge don’t officially do the ELAT anymore, it’s just called an admissions test. but the structure is exactly the same, and there are lots of past papers from previous years online.
what i personally did to make sure my application stood out is demonstrate that academic journey in your PS that i mentioned in my previous comment. it showcases your thought process, and that’s the exact thought process that they will try to see within you during your interview. so showing it early on in your personal statement gives you a head start. as for the books you talk about, they don’t have to be those niche books that no one’s heard of in their life. i mentioned some popular works in my PS, such as paradise lost by milton, lolita by nabokov, dostoevsky etc. what matters is, again, your thought process. think of interesting interpretations, or ways you can link your ideas together, or if you can’t, find some online. look into literary theory and write about some ideas you find interesting. there are dozens of different ways to analyse literature and at cambridge, the Practical Criticism part of the course focuses on exactly that, so already having some knowledge about it and showing that in your PS will be beneficial. you also don’t have to have a load of extracurriculars, work experience connected to your degree, or any oxbridge programmes. i had basically none. supercurriculars are much more important.
also, utilise the cambridge personal statement! cambridge do say that it doesn’t minimise your chance of getting a place, but i think it’s still worth writing something for it. don’t write any waffle about why cambridge is the perfect institution for you. everybody believes it’s the perfect institution for them. also don’t write about why you think the college you chose is perfect for you, because you could be pooled to a different one. look into the course and pick out something that really interests you. i really liked how in the cambridge english course, you can actually take exam papers from different language departments. so i talked about how as a bilingual person, this specific feature in the course stood out to me as i would like to focus my studies on the analysis of russian literature. i also liked how the course mentioned that it examines the connection between literature and visual art and as someone who’s into drama as well as painting, this drew me to the course. again, the statement isn’t necessary but it can be helpful.
sorry for the long answer but hopefully this is helpful. if you have any other questions or if you wanna PM me for interview help, please do! as someone from a low performing school, i was never encouraged to apply to cambridge, nor was i helped with the very long and tedious application process, and therefore struggled a lot. so hopefully i can prevent this from happening to others<3

Parents, you are free to comment on this thread to provide words of encouragement and guidance to the applicants, but you also have your own thread for parental debates -> https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6325348
Here are a few suggested opening questions, but ask whatever you want regarding Cambridge.
1) What A Levels are you doing (or other eligible qualifications)?
2) What course at Cambridge do you have your eyes on? And why?
3) What grades did you get/are you predicted to get at GCSE?
4) Why Cambridge specifically? and why not Oxford?
5) Which admissions tests do you have to sit, and when will you start preparing for them?
6) What are you doing to help your studies and potentially your application to Cambridge?
7) What do you want to do with your degree from Cambridge?
8) Have you decided which college you're applying to?
NOTE: Unless posting about something particularly sensitive, you are generally expected to post on this thread with your username rather than anonymous, as it makes it easier for contributors to provide guidance to help you through your journey.

---

Note: All data you share is at your own risk, the forms and resources linked here are not controlled by The Student Room Group Ltd. If you have any issues, please tag a member of the Universities Volunteer team (in purple and cyan at the bottom of this page). For more information please click here.

Great Post!
That’s probably some of the best advice I have seen for oxbridge applications…

Hi everyone, I'm Nickname and I'm looking at applying for Cambridge, but I'm not sure that that's where I want to go yet.
Thank you!

What are the most LGBTQ+ friendly colleges?

Trinity, Magdalene, St John’s, Jesus and Peterhouse.

Are there any colleges that are considered to not be LGBTQ+ friendly?

@Wired_1800. Please do not answer questions in this manner. You have no personal experience and no factual evidence that those Colleges are in any way more LGBTQ+ friendly than others. For example, you didn't list at least one College I am aware of where the head of the College is gay.
It's not an issue at any College, save you might get idiots, or more likely people with a relatively narrow upbringing and world-view, anywhere. The College student population changes every 3 years, with a 1/3 change every year - sub-cultures really can't survive for very long, especially bad ones. The Fellowship endures for much longer, and has more influence on the culture, but Cambridge is incredibly diverse, and very liberal, and people live all sorts of lives and still get on well. As I say, I know at least one Head of College who is gay, but there are likely many others - it's not something anyone would bother with finding out and remembering.
There are lots of support opportunities just because the demographic and life-change of many students, ie the first time they are away from home and beginning to define their adult selves.

Hello. I provided my answer based on those who I know from those colleges.

The sexual orientation of the head of the College has no bearing on their support of the LGBTQ+ community. You could be challenged to suggest that it does. It is like making statement on race because Lord Simon Woolley is Head of Homerton or Sonita Alleyne leads Jesus.

I'd expect a bit more justification than just reeling off a list of colleges with no context or further explanation – I wasn't sure whether your answer was serious or sarcastically listing some random colleges to make a point that it's not a question where you usually can give much of a meaningful answer or meaningfully distinguish colleges.