Camridge interview

Viewer be warned: if you think janice is an awesome student, please remain with that delusion and stop reading. Cheers! (this was posted a few days ago on facebook but not everyone can access it)

Okay I must admit I was pretty dumb for not preparing thoroughly for this even though I had help from the seniors. I didn’t expect the medicine interview to be so similar to the natural sciences interview. I should kick myself. I suppose writing about my own experience would be the least I can do to make myself useful.

Anyway, the thing started off with him asking why I want to do medicine, what are the most important qualities of a doc etc. then why Cambridge. I mentioned the SBMO example in my personal statement about diabetics wearing covered shoes to reduce incidence of gangrene so he tested me on why diabetics are more susceptible to gangrene.

After that, he asked me what endoscopy was. So I replied it was sticking a scope either down your mouth or up your anus. Come to think of it, I sounded rather crude -.- he proceeded to show me four different pictures, one showing a healthy small intestine wall, and its view under a microscope. The other two was a seemingly smooth small intestine wall and the other its view under the microscope. I was quizzed on what I thought the healthy pictures were. I intelligently answered that the microscope view was micro villi despite seeing the capillaries and masses of cells and the little finger like projections on the vili as well. He then asked if I knew what celiac disease was. I said I had heard of it but did not know what exactly it did. He then proceeded to explain that it was a wheat allergy. I was tasked to identify the problem with the second set of pictures of which the vili was destroyed due to the immune system wrongly attacking it from the wheat allergy. I was asked about what symptoms the person would show as well. Being me, I started crapping about having abdominal swelling and pain due to inflammation and having your insides eaten up by your own body. However, while that was true, those were not the exact symptoms. He asked me what the small intestine’s functions were, of which I responded to digest most food and absorb food. He then asked me the process by which the nutrients were taken in and asked me, other than amino acids and those macro nutrients mentioned, what other macro nutrient was absorbed. I answered water, of which he proceeded to ask what the process of taking in the nutrients was. Honestly, I had forgotten most of my year 2 bio so I randomly said diffusion. Then after he shook his head, I said co transport, which was wrong too. The actual answer was osmosis -.- kick myself again. From there, I deduced that the person would have really bad diarrhea which was the right answer.

I was then asked if I had studied proteins before, of which I said yes. I was then tested on protein structures. He asked me to draw an amino acid and a peptide bond. He then asked me what a secondary protein structure was and name the examples. That was pretty easy. Okay then the very very angsty part comes. I hope you all don’t mind if I post my FB convo here because im lazy to type it again.



idk honestly. i had a bad feeling when he said we have run out of time, but it seemed he filled up the whole page unless there was another side. there was a graph on the table that he didnt test me on though :O. i felt like an idiot because i spent a really long time trying to figure out what a leucine zipper was... D:

he asked me if I knew what an a helix was first, then asked me how i thought the hydrophobic groups interacted in water. apparently they arent projected into the interior of the helix because the core is too small.. (maybe its just me) so the non polar leucines will form with other leucines on another a helix to make a leucine zipper hence the structure is stable in water... OKAY... HOW DID I GET A+ FOR PROTEINS?!



Yup so as you can predict by now, Cambridge is pretty strict with time. so I ran out of time. cheers! He was still very kind to ask me if I had any questions though. So I asked a random question about whether everyone at Cambridge does research. Apparently all of them do, otherwise they cant get a job there. Haha so I hope you don’t mind all my ranting and hope this helps! Btw the graph question was on the weight of the baby one that came out last year as well for natural sciences.

I need to study for BMAT. Bye!