Can I get into Oxford University? || Oxford Interview 

Episode 18: Mike goes for OLIVER'S JOB?!

@@MikeBoyd XD

@🕊️ Peace 🕊️ hi

Graduates ... in 2 weeks 😁

@@MikeBoyd 2032: Mike is an Oxford professor?

Harvard next

it was sarcasm

This came out worse than intended.

@@OHOE1 he did

That is actually such an amazing story, I absolutely adore that

I really like this question there are so many ways to approximately solve it with close to no information

Definitely happened

I tried to do this myself using a different method, failed :), props to your family

There's a lot of different variations on questions like this. It's called a Fermi approximation, the idea is because your errors are randomly over/under you'll probably end up in the right ballpark

Bro stuck his finger in a light socket and decided he loved the look

Definitely caught me off guard lol

@@TomRocksMaths rare Pokemon, Tom in the comment section found!

It is true

Yeah, for example it hadn't occurred to me before that getting "unstuck" while solving a problem is a skill that you could improve. And now that I'm aware of it it's obvious how useful such a skill would be. I'm already thinking about how it could work in computer programming.

@@puupipo Yes! I had the same thought and completely agree.

@@puupipo same I’m in my first year in computer engineering and the hardest part for me in programming is to order your thoughts so the computer can understand it and when you get stuck on something how can you solve it.

@@Rogue_Route For the first problem you mentioned I've found it really useful to always write down the whole "skeleton" of your program in plain English before writing any code. It's a lot easier for your mind to handle when you're not trying to design the algorithm AND translate it into code simultaneously. For the second bit, taking a break to clear your mind can help. There's also something called "rubber duck debugging", give that a google if you're unfamiliar with the concept.

@@puupipo thanks for the advice never thought that writing the program in English first will help am going to try that before my exam in a few days in c++

Yeah I had no idea what I was doing when I applied to University. The fact that people are this disciplined and intelligent at 18 is crazy to me.

Tbf, I was lucky that I was obsessed with what I wanted to do early on. Definitely had my hyperfixation play a part in that

This is whyi love Oxford 😌💯humble people everywhere 😌💁‍♀️💯

Interesting. In the US you’re not applying to a course. You take a major, but you don’t have to immediately and half of your classes will be general education across a myriad of subjects both required and elective.

@@SamAronow yeah it's usually 4 years in the US and 3 years in the UK. Maybe that's why.

In the US, they just want people who will give them money :)

@@WaterYaDune Mate, the US System of being able to do whatever you want once you are in the University, from being able to change Major, to doing a Minor on something completely unrelated, or even double majoring is a much, much better system than the current European system.

@@joaomiguelgoncalvesdematos6135 Agreed

Can I ask what humanities subject did you interview for? I would really love to apply to Oxford for Philosophy and Modern Languages and I am a little unsure about what questions they would ask..

If only real job interviews were like that

For the third one I would just do a*b < a+b Which implies a*(b-1)< b a

this is exactly what I was looking for...thanks!

wait...there's an error here- Insert 2/3 as x: f(2/3)+2f(3)=3/2 shouldn't it be 2/3 rather than 3/2? (the =x bit)

F(3) is equal to 20/27

@@thecrafters6220 that is what I got

I’m in the same boat for the same subject. The interviews were interesting but very intense and focused

THIS please make a video on it!

I do philosophy, politics, & economics at Oxford, & my philosophy interview was super precise, like if I said a single word which didn't quite fit with the rest of the sentence the interviewer would ask why I'd said it. At one point he asked me the same question 3x in a row (as in, once I'd answered he just asked the exact same question again) while just staring at me lol, was very stressful. The actual subject of the interview was just various ethical scenarios which he wanted me to reason through, so a pretty specific take on philosophy. Not something you could prepare for really

@@georgebarber3280 Omg PPE at Oxford. You're probs sat next to the next 3 PMs lol (Or I'll be able to say I replied to George Barber's comment on RU-vid once! lol)

So I had my english interview for Oxford a couple of months ago and they gave me a passage and 15 minutes to prep. They then just said talk about what you find interesting so I suppose the hardest bit was knowing what to talk about.

@@georgebarber3280Is it true you do no work in Ppe?

While there might be people that just don't have the intelligence due to some genetic or developmental issue, the vast, vast majority of people are able to achieve similar levels of inteligence through work. That said not all work is equal, if you only train yourself at solving a problem in a particular way then you're not working on the skill of abstracting the solutions.

I'd tend to somewhat second Spliter, above. I think that it's rarely a case of intelligence with these things, but more one of motivation. And I don't mean this in a 'oh, you were unmotivated, you should have just tried harder' kind of a way. I mean this as in: 'there are lots of different ways to handle maths, some of them suited to interviews, some not', and unless someone possesses god-tier motivational abilities, I think most people will tend towards working in the way which most suits them. So, in my case, I used to love teaching physics (slight detour from maths I know, but I've never been interviewed for maths, and figure the idea I'm trying to convey converts quite nicely), and so I associate vocalising my thought processes on the spot with being a rewarding experience, which meant that any prep I did would tend to use this skill, which meant I trained it more, which meant I would use it more. And this is even in sitting exams and in doing exam-prep - my tendency would be to try and handle a problem in a way which I could most easily explain/justify, which often wasted tonnes of time (in fact, this is a huge problem in the amount of time I spend on uni work to this day - multiple pages of explanation/thinking sometimes go into a 2 line algebraic solution). In other words, when it came to uni applications, I'd tend to do well in interviews, and far less well in my exams (managing to muck up my physics exam - by far my strongest subject - fairly badly). Point being, I _do_ think it's possible to train this, but I think it's a question of whether you find the most useful skills to solve the problems the most rewarding, and hence on how you tend to approach problems. I suspect, like me, you worked really hard, developed really useful skills, and whilst you will have developed your skills for interviews and the MAT, a tonne, you might have learnt _more_ in regions which were still practiced by MAT/interview prep, but which weren't as vital. And I think, most of all, my point with this is that you _still_ put in a tonne of work, you _still_ will have gotten a lot out of it. Whether or not it's the same stuff you need for the interview, honestly, who cares? I've got multiple friends at Oxbridge, and life there seems to value similar things as found in the entrance exams. If something else was the most rewarding bit of maths to you, then, you know what, the skills which you built up the most, but which didn't help the most, probably would've been neglected by the Oxford system, meaning you'd've had to put in even more work to make up the difference between the skills you found most rewarding, and the ones they wanted (this, again, from the experiences of a few friends). In short, huge congratulations for putting in all the prep - you probably developed lots of skills which you found more rewarding, and which Oxford wouldn't have nourished. So don't put yourself down, as 'not having been smart enough to learn what they wanted, despite all your work' - I think it's a huge fallacy to assume that repeating a particular action (even something such as diverse problem solving and abstract thinking) will produce a given particular result - it'll always vary person to person, and _can't_ be catered for by every university. Honestly, I remember finding past-papers and stuff to be a _huge_ drag, so congratulations on whatever prep you did - that in and of itself is worthy of commendation! You sound like you have a passion, so best of luck, I'm sure it will (have) take(n) you far! (Oh, and a slight addendum, RE the final part of Spliter's message - I often get the feeling from people, and often honestly perpetuate this myself, that learning by rote, or getting _really_ good at a particularly simple process, isn't very useful if you can't abstract it. That's not necessarily true: Often, clever algorithms and simplifications are only found by people who have just spent a lot of time working with a problem, and its processes.)

@@spliter88 I think it doesn't really matter how much you practice or study, if you can't take your knowledge of one thing and see a similarity in another to then apply it to that situation it's going to be tough. The number of smart people at my school that would get a question like "equally share 10 sweets between 2 people" and not be able to do it because the question wasn't "divide 10 by 2" was crazy (oversimplified example to get the point across). They were smart because they could just remember things and recite them, but couldn't actually apply that knowledge if it wasn't presented in the exact way they learned it. And throughout uni, doing computing, we would have 3 tutorials that taught us X-Y-Z, and then we'd be set to go do a task that required Z-X-X-Y, half the class would complain because "we were never taught how to do Z-X-X-Y"

@@scottg3192 My point was that knowing how to apply skills you've learned in one area and apply them to something else is itself a skill you can learn. You learn to abstract, it's not something that you're born with. Like, literally the tests they do on toddlers show that below a certain age they're just unable to abstract at all, and they learn that over their childhood. I don't think that it stops either, there's more and more complex abstractions we can learn as we age, a skill we can train.

@@scottg3192 It's nature vs nurture. Only one can get you so far. But I still think it is possible to learn it. Like with maths, i was never good at abstracting one problem's formula to another. But I have nowhere near that kind of problem with computing. But in theory it's the same, you learn one thing and apply it to the other. But some people struggle at computing but not maths problems.

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It’s never too late

@@lol360noscope6 Very true! That's why I focus on digital art history. There are some interdisciplinary opportunities and projects that combine computer science, mathematics and art history, so that's the direction I'm trying to take. I'll probably never be the main mathematician in the group, but I'll take what I can get, haha.

Went through the NatSciBio application process myself and I agree, it is stressful. Luckily, it gets less stressful each time.

it's way less stressful than being a student there :/

@@hunterG60k Well yea, its because of the good old stress from exams and tests. For me in terms of stress level it has been: exams > interview > tests

@@spiralingsphere3785 I think it depends on what you're studying, in medicine there's a lot of pressure from all directions. They don't tell people about the suicides that happen every year.

@@hunterG60k are you a cam student?

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0_S0TN5-15w.html Finally it's here

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I studied compsci here in the US and I would find that very interesting too.

have you learnt differnetial geometry yet? if you havent, you should take a course on it! it's so beautiful!

Can't believe you watch Mike too!!! Crazy crossover 😂

I hope you’re feeling alright at Oxford mate :)

@@karunk7050 Haha thanks 😅 guess u mean from the video

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I burst out laughing when he said that, always the optimist. I'll bet he would be fine if he made maths a hobby / passion like he's made learning random physical / mental tasks on the show all these years. Like playing chess a few hours a week, if he simply made maths his thing a few hours a week, he would get in next time.

First heard this in 'Dumb and Dumber': ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--9IgLueodZA.html

Keep in mind he already has a degree in Engineering and work experience.

@@shrifrai1634 oh so a week of studying will give him a proper shot at the interview. And i believe people prepare for 2 or 3 months for this test

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And check the tattoos on your forearm for formulas

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Oxford interviews are really good at pushing you until they find something you can't do. They start you off easy usually but will keep developing and adding bits to the question until there's something you get wrong. Even out of friends that were successful, we got asked vastly different questions which stopped at really different points

About the factorization of 840, the first question you may want to ask is *how many* factors you want to split the number into. For this, you can easily prove that one single factor a * b is at least as good as leaving the factors separate, which would only add a + b: a * b >= a + b | divide by b a >= a/b + 1 Because none of the factors can be 1, b is at least 2, and therefore, a >= a/2 + 1 >= a/b + 1 = a/2 + 1 | subtract a/2 a/2 >= 1 a >= 2 and this is of course also true because the factors still are at least 2. So now that we have proven that any two factors of a solution can be combined into a single factor to get a new solution that is at least as good, we know that at least one best solution will be a solution of the minimum number of factors that is allowed, which is in this case two factors. So we know that there are two factors x and y that multiply into 840, and their sum should be optimized. So you know that x * y = 840, and therefore, y = 840/x, which can be inserted into the to be optimized function f(x) = x + y = x + 840/x. So to optimize that function, you take a look at where the first derivative becomes 0, what the sign of the second derivative is at that position, and what the limit behaviour of the function is. f'(x) = 1 - 840*x^-2 f''(x) = 1680*x^-3 So because the second derivative is always positive for a positive value of x, you can already know that the value of x defined by f'(x)=0 will be a local minimum, which is not what we are looking for. What's left is the function's limit behaviour, which *would* be x=840, y=1 and x=1, y=840 if those were accepted values, but instead we'll have to look at the next smaller/larger acceptable x. Because the next x that is larger than 1 is x=2, you get the pair x=2, y=420 (and, due to the symmetric nature, x=420, y=2) which add up to 422, which is now proven to be the largest possible sum of a factorization. So the answer is that the factorization 2 * 420 = 840 gives us the largest sum, 422.

The pizza one is a recursion formula: f(n) = f(n-1) + n f(0) = 1 f(1) = 2 f(2) = 4 f(3) = 7 f(4) = 11 (if you try to draw this, one of the slices will look very, very tiny) f(5) = 16 (likewise, one of the slices will look extremely tiny) It would be nice to draw this on paper to show you, but thankfully this is also a question/answer you can look read about here: www.csun.edu/~ac53971/pump/20090922_pizza.pdf (see pages 1 and 2, recursion formula, pizza slice question). I also ended up with 2*420 = 422. My work for that one was really simple though. 840, I make "factorization trees" 840 ~ 2*420 ~ 2*210 ~2*105... and so forth (I used 2 here intentionally, but I simplfy and clarify below, e.g., just multply the 2's together respectively.) 2*420 = 422 4*210 = 214 8*105= 117 If I keep on going with this tree, the sum keeps on getting smaller, and it seems that 422 (from 2*420) is the largest one so far. Thus, 422 seems like the factorization of 840 that will provide the largest sum. You can also use KappaScopeZZ's (the RU-vidr who also commented here) method of the derivatives to double-check some things, but that is not really necessary per se (you would usually use that in the context of a function, and/or a financial-related mathematics question from what I remember). The big picture is most important, as the interviewers mentioned.

did you have to do yours online as well? it can make it so much more nervewracking when youre not even there in person!

@@joeyhardin5903 Yeah mine was online, I was sorta hyping myself up beforehand and mid-sentence the panel joined the meeting so that didnt help - in person would have been much more enjoyable!

I had my cambridge law interview mid december and i had done quite a few mocks but the real thing was so much scarier so you’re defo not alone :) best of luck for your application!

I'm currently an first year law student at Oxford and those interviews were hard. Caught myself having to think because I genuinely had no idea how to answer at first Like you said, you usually think you did worse than you actually did. Especially for law, it's not about knowing the law for the interviews but more your logic towards arriving to your conclusions

@@brianj05 did you get an offer?

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Is in not simply 1 cut 2 slices, 2 cuts 4 slices thus n cuts 2n slices?

@@DavidHughesArchitect if wvery cut is concurrent yes, but non of the cuts are concurrent so if you have >2 cuts then there is more to consider than just the outer areas

An honour seeing your comment here! I also get flashbacks about my idiotic mistakes in an interview that cost me my place. How are you doing?

Can confirm

Lol

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