Advice for Year 12 applying for Oxford chemistry

Just so you are aware, there is a code of conduct applicants to Oxford are required to follow and so we can’t give exact details of our interviews (i.e what we were asked etc).
I have just finished my first year of MChem chemistry at Oxford. I got in on my second attempt having been previously rejected after making an open application (I was assigned St Hugh’s as a first college and St Hilda’s as a second). I applied to Magdalen, was interviewed by Magdalen and Somerville, got an open offer from Queens and yet somehow I ended up at St John’s lol. Any advice given is based on what I did right the second time and in hindsight having messed up the first.
I personally used Olympiad round 1 past papers (and some round 2 past papers I had access to from when I got in to round 2 in 2022, but I believe these are resources that unless you are a round 2 participant yourself, you unfortunately won’t be able to access) to get practice applying what I had learnt at A level to unfamiliar situations and taught other students material from the A level course to get practice with improving my communication and articulation skills. As your interviews are only about half an hour long, you need to know how to boil down your explanations to make them as relevant and concise as possible.
I’m sure you’ve heard thousands of times that the interviewers need you to think out loud - and this advice is really important. Make sure you explain assumptions you make in calculations, why you have reached x conclusion etc etc - even if you use erroneous reasoning, you will still at least make it clear that you can at least independently think about a problem and it makes it quicker and easier for your interviewers to give you more specific and helpful prompts where necessary.
If you have any questions about my experience of the first year of the course, feel free to ask away. Just note that I’m not very active on TSR any more and so expect slow responses from me.

Hey, I’m just currently looking through all the detailed answers you’ve given me and have tackled the questions from reply 15. I’m very grateful for your help and it’s helping me become more aware of areas I need to target. If you don’t mind sharing of course, what mistakes did you make the first time that you improved on the second time? And would you say that the physical, inorganic, organic and maths separate interviews range in difficulty? Or would that depend on individual colleges? Thank you so much again!

Hey, I’m just currently looking through all the detailed answers you’ve given me and have tackled the questions from reply 15. I’m very grateful for your help and it’s helping me become more aware of areas I need to target. If you don’t mind sharing of course, what mistakes did you make the first time that you improved on the second time? And would you say that the physical, inorganic, organic and maths separate interviews range in difficulty? Or would that depend on individual colleges? Thank you so much again!

Hello, yes this would be great! Also I'm wondering how to choose a college. I'm interested in whichever ones have cheap accommodation (I don't mind living close to the centre) but a good location and subsidies would be amazing.

From the above criteria, St John’s (coincidentally where I study) is a pretty good fit.
Start here and see which colleges it suggests to you: https://apply.oxfordsu.org/colleges/suggester/

Please can you give me some advice on what to include in my personal statement- it’s really stressing me out!

Can you give me some examples of how you analysed your supercurriculars? Also, do you need to write about the facts that you learnt and explain what you learnt? Or would it be more beneficial to say what you found interesting?

Please can you give me some advice on what to include in my personal statement- it’s really stressing me out!

Can you give me some examples of how you analysed your supercurriculars? Also, do you need to write about the facts that you learnt and explain what you learnt? Or would it be more beneficial to say what you found interesting?

I will give you two full paragraphs of my long since submitted personal statement (e.g don’t copy any of them word-for-word - it’ll trigger the plagiarism detectors) - one where I wrote about one of my supercurriculars and the other to demonstrate how I met some of the other admissions requirements:

Now let’s look at the admissions criteria to see some of the strengths and weaknesses of the supercurriculars paragraph (I’ll leave it to you to decide how helpful the other paragraph is and in what ways it relates to the admissions requirements):
-Under the “academic ability” section of the criteria, there are three points that this paragraph meets: “capacity to absorb new ideas”, “spirit of enquiry” and “an understanding of the chemical concepts studied so far”. I’ve clearly indicated I’ve understood some content from the A level, seen a point where it has been flagrantly contradicted and then gone out of my way to rationalise how the thing in question actually works using new ideas (in this case MO theory).
-The other part of the admissions criteria it meets is the “interest in chemistry” section.
-As good as this structure is, it’s a very long paragraph and doesn’t really demonstrate how I have concluded MO theory could explain it (so it doesn’t really meet the “reasoning ability” point in the criteria). The use of the word “potentially” is in hindsight particularly poor because it indicates that perhaps the link I have established between the areas isn’t well-founded.
(Source: https://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/admissions#collapse2607161)

If you have a favourite area of chemistry, focus your supercurriculars on it.
I am very happy to find some areas where A level hasn’t been quite so truthful if I can be made aware of which exam board you are with. I will then allow you to research them yourself and you can summarise your findings in your personal statement.

I’m with OCR A, and, yes, that would be very helpful! Thank you!

Do you prefer organic, inorganic or physical chemistry?

Do you prefer organic, inorganic or physical chemistry?

Organic!

Scratch that, have a few examples that immediately come to mind:
Inorganic chemistry:
There isn’t much where OCR A tells you anything that is outright wrong, but the course could certainly go into greater depth. For example, what does it mean when the d-orbitals in a transition metal ion “split in energy” and how come dichromate and permanganate ions have such vivid colours when they theoretically should have 0 d electrons and therefore cannot be experiencing d-d electron transitions?
Organic chemistry:
OCR shows you how to oxidise 1° alcohols to either aldehydes or carboxylic acids, but only shows you enough to reduce aldehydes back to 1° alcohols. In reality, you can reduce carboxylic acids back to 1° alcohols in a single reaction, but how? Furthermore, you can oxidise 1° alcohols to aldehydes without needing distillation, but what reagents would that require? Mechanistically, how can this be justified?
OCR shows you one mechanism for nucleophilic substitution on 1° and 2° haloalkanes. This mechanism is favoured when you have a good nucleophile in a polar aprotic solvent, but why? If you change up the conditions a little and change the substrate to a 3° haloalkane, the mechanism is completely different - how come? Even weirder still, A level teaches you that you cannot do nucleophilic substitution on aromatic compounds because they are so electron-dense they repel nucleophiles, but there are instances where this is wrong and so what are these exceptions and why are they exceptions? How are they useful (Sanger’s reagent is an example)?
When you get to arene chemistry, you will be taught that electron-withdrawing groups favour substitution onto the 3 (meta) position and electron-donating groups favour substitution onto the 2 (ortho) and 4 (para) positions - resonance structures can be used to account for these, but why?
Physical chemistry:
The equilibrium constants you calculate will be approximations with units, whereas actual thermodynamic equilibrium constants without units. How come (hint: look up what activities are)?
For kinetics, you will be taught how to calculate simple rate laws where reactions have one slow step in the mechanism, but what happens if there are several slow steps?

Thank you so much!
Would it be good to say something like: when learning a level chemistry, I learnt x
However, after further research, I found out this x
This is what I found interesting x

Since 70 percent of applicants get called in for interviews, I'm wondering (as chem has such high requirements on the first place) which applications would get rejected at all?

Thank you so much!
Would it be good to say something like: when learning a level chemistry, I learnt x
However, after further research, I found out this x
This is what I found interesting x

That’s an excellent structure to follow. I probably wouldn’t use those exact words though as they’ll be picked up by a plagiarism detector now they will have been cached by google.
As for the number of paragraphs, I’m not too sure as it’s looking as though the structure of a personal statement is being changed to dedicated sections. I’m not sure what the character limits are, but for now, find the two areas you can develop the most understanding of and assume a paragraph for each with the aforementioned structure to them.

Thank you for your advice!!
Would I be able to send you my personal statement so I can have some feedback?