As you enter your final year of school and prepare to move on to university, you may find it difficult to work on your university application and your school work at the same time. If you’re applying to the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge, this becomes even more challenging.
As well as the standard application process, Oxbridge applicants will need to complete additional steps to be considered, including admissions tests and interviews. These can be extremely difficult and require a lot of preparation time which, when combined with school work and exam preparation, can become overwhelming.
However, due to the dates of each application component, it’s possible to effectively manage your preparation time to ensure you don’t have too many things to focus on at one time. In this guide, we’ll explore the best times to focus on specific parts of your academics and application, as well as cover some tips to help you better manage your time. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a much better chance of both earning your offer and achieving the grades you need to be accepted.
What To Work On During Your Summer Holidays?
Let’s begin this exploration at the start of the summer holiday before your final year of school. As with any other year, you’ll have around six weeks of free time to relax and recharge. However, this year’s holidays will be more intensive than usual if you’re applying to Oxbridge, as you’ll have various things you need to do in order to build your application up. Let’s explore some of the key areas you’ll need to focus on for these six weeks:
UCAS Application
Oxbridge applicants still need to complete and submit a standard UCAS application form, but there’s one major difference to consider; you’ll need to submit this application by October 15th. This is several months earlier than the standard deadline, so it’s important that you start working on it early so you don’t miss this date.
Most parts of the UCAS application process aren’t very challenging, as you’ll just need to submit personal information, education history and, potentially, some details on past employment. You will also need to select your university options, which will likely include either Oxford or Cambridge.
It’s important to attend open days or do research on other potential options, as it’s crucial to have a good backup in case you don’t get your Oxbridge offer. Your college choice is also important to consider, so attending the Oxbridge open days helps you explore potential options.
Your academic reference can wait until your return to school, so the final thing you’ll need to do during this time is work on your Personal Statement. By the end of the summer break, you should have a draft that you’re fairly happy with. It doesn’t necessarily need to be the final version, but you should ensure the majority of the work is done on it before you return to school.
Admissions Test Preparation
If your course requires an admissions test, now is the best time to start your preparation. Most admissions tests aren’t taken until October, but it’s important to take your preparation slowly so that you have time to naturally develop your skills. Cramming all of your preparation into one month will be less effective and cause more unnecessary stress, especially if you’re doing it during your school term.
Depending on the type of test you’re taking, revision may or may not be required, as some tests cover general thinking skills rather than subject knowledge. However, practising questions will be essential for any admissions test, so this is where you should focus most of your efforts.
When starting your preparation, one of the first things to do is to take a full mock test under exam conditions. You probably won’t do well, but you’ll create a baseline for your performance, which you can then build upon with practice. Monitoring your progress will let you see if you’re on the right track and ensure you can change course in time if you aren’t progressing as you need to.
As for how you should spend your preparation time during the summer, there’s no single way to effectively get ready for an admissions test. As long as you’re regularly practising your exam technique and revising any knowledge you need to know, you can craft a plan that suits your learning style.
UCAT Preparation
If you’re applying to study Medicine, your summer is going to be a little bit different. Medicine applicants must take the University Clinical Aptitude Test (UCAT), which is a general admissions test that covers four key thinking skills. The test can be sat at any time between July 7th and September 26th in 2025, meaning your preparation schedule will need to change.
It is suggested that the best time to take the UCAT is in mid to late August, soon before you return to school. This is because it gives you a longer amount of your summer holidays to prepare for the test while also not overlapping with your school term.
Of course, you’ll still need to prepare throughout the rest of the summer, but you won’t have the extra time in September and October that other applicants will have. This may not be a bad thing, as many applicants prefer to get the admissions test out of the way so they don’t have to think about it once they start their school work again. While you may need to take extra time to prepare during the holidays, not having an overlap between your academics and application generally makes it less stressful.
Application Enrichment
Beyond the official steps required in the application, successful Oxbridge applicants will also engage in lots of activities that demonstrate their interest in the subject they want to study. When doing this, your interest in them should be authentic, so this part is less of a job and more of an extra-curricular activity.
This can include reading, research projects, trips to relevant locations, or anything else that you feel teaches you more about the subject. As well as this, work placements and volunteering opportunities are recommended where possible (and are essential in some cases). Ideally, you should have already completed some of these, but the summer holidays are still a good time to engage in some more activities.
As well as being beneficial to your personal and professional development, all of this will also provide you with more talking points for your Personal Statement to ensure it stands out from other applicants. Eventually, it will also provide you with more things to discuss in your interviews too, so pack in as much as you can now before you meet with the admissions team.
School Work
Lastly, you need to consider how you should continue with your academic work during this period. There’s a lot to consider in terms of your application, but you may also have assigned schoolwork to complete, so ensure you save time to complete this.
You may also want to start preparing for your end-of-year exams during this time. While it can be beneficial to look over the content you learnt last year (especially if it relates to the admissions test you’re taking), this isn’t the best time to start an intensive revision plan.
Firstly, you’ve only finished your first year of sixth form (or equivalent), so you haven’t learnt all of the content that will be included in the exams. Secondly, you’ll have both the winter and spring breaks to really dig into this material in time for May and June, so it’s better to use this time to focus on the tasks that are coming soon (UCAS applications and admissions tests). Schoolwork shouldn’t be completely ignored, but your application is the main priority during the summer.
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Returning To School
In September, most Oxbridge applicants will return to school for their last academic year. This is where the challenge of managing your academics and application really begins. As well as returning to your regular classes, you’ve got to submit your UCAS application, take your admissions tests and prepare for your interviews, so let’s review these steps one by one to see how they should be prioritised:
Submitting Your UCAS Application
As we know, UCAS applications need to be submitted by October 15th for Oxbridge applicants, giving you roughly a month and a half to complete it and send it off. If you utilise your summer holidays effectively, there should be much left for you to do.
UCAS applications can’t be submitted until early September, but don’t feel that you have to send it out on the first day. Take your time to review everything you’ve included, including finalising your Personal Statement and confirming your university choices. Some universities will hold open days in September, so you can still review options if you weren’t able to decide all of your choices already.
If you haven’t already, this is the time to get your academic reference sorted as well. A member of faculty at your school may be designated to provide these, or you may need to speak with a teacher that you trust to provide one. Either way, this part won’t require much input from you.
While it’s good to take your time to properly check everything, you also don’t want to leave the application to the last minute. Getting it sent will ensure that it’s done, which is one less thing to worry about when you already have so much else going on. Plus, as long as your details are all correct, the UCAS application is probably the thing that Oxford and Cambridge care least about. Ensuring you do well in your admissions test and interviews is far more important for your chances of success.
Taking Your Admissions Test
As we mentioned before, most Oxbridge admissions tests are taken in October. Test dates are spread out across the month, so ensure you know which days your test is held on.
Due to the timings of these tests, you’ll have roughly one or two months from the end of summer until your test date. While you’ll have other things to focus on during this time, it’s important to continue your admissions test preparation in the same manner as before.
Even if you were consistently performing well in your practice by the end of the holidays, it can be easy to lose the skills you developed if you don’t continue to practice regularly, so it’s crucial that you find time in between school work to continue attempting more practice questions and mock tests.
This may mean that you have to dedicate more hours to working than you normally would, but understand that this is a temporary sacrifice for a few weeks to ensure you get a score on the test that will get you an interview at Oxford or Cambridge. Once the test has been completed, a major part of your workload will be removed, so focus on the outcome during these months to remain motivated.
Continuing with School Work
Of course, returning to school means you’ll be going back to your standard school schedule, which will include classes, homework and exam revision. This should all be a top priority for you, but how do you balance this work with your application preparation?
Crucially, your time in school should primarily spent working on on your schoolwork. While some of your free periods could be spent working on admissions test preparation and interview practice (more on this soon), most of your time should be spent taking in the curriculum in preparation for your exams or working on coursework where relevant.
You’ll probably have some additional work to do at home, but try to get as much of this done while at school as you can, at least for the first two or three months of the term. Dividing academics and application between school and home allows you to create a natural balance that is reinforced by your environment. Doing this prevents distractions from either side and provides set times in which certain tasks should be done.
This divide won’t be perfect as some application tasks are better to do at school, but this is one of the key ways to ensure you can manage both major tasks.
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Preparing For Oxbridge Interviews
For the first three months of the term, you will not have been invited to an interview, nor should you expect an invitation until the middle of November at the earliest. Therefore, you may wonder why you should start preparing if an interview isn’t guaranteed.
It all comes down to the timeline for Oxbridge applicants at this stage. After submitting their application and completing their test, they won’t hear back from their college until November if they’ve been invited to an interview. These interviews are held in the first three weeks of December, so applicants will only have a few week’s notice if they’ve been invited.
This doesn’t leave enough time to effectively prepare from scratch, so it’s important that you begin preparing beforehand to ensure you’re ready if the invitation comes.
While you could start working on this during the summer holidays, it may not be the most effective use of time when compared to your UCAS and admissions test preparation. However, once you return to school, you should begin to work on your interview techniques and research common questions for your course.
Research will only get you so far in your preparation, so interview practice will be the most effective way to get yourself ready. Whether it’s with peers, faculty or family, you should aim to regularly practice your interview answers in either single questions or full mock interviews. A typical Oxford or Cambridge interview lasts about 20 – 30 minutes, so you should aim to complete practice sessions of this length once or twice a week for the first few months of term.
Once your admissions test is out of the way, this is the only major part of the application you have left to prepare for, so November is the ideal time to increase the time spent on your preparation to ensure you’ve practised as many scenarios as possible. Keep working through mock interviews, find any more details you can about your potential interview and wait for the invitation to come.
Once it does, be sure to remain calm and continue the course you’re on. Going overboard with your preparation will cause you to overthink your approach and increase your stress levels, which is the last thing you want when your interview is right around the corner. Keep doing what has been working so far and target the areas that you feel are your weakest to ensure you feel fully prepared for the real thing.
On The Day Of The Interviews
Oxbridge applicants actually attend multiple interviews, which can sometimes be spread across multiple days. Having this gap between interviews can be stressful, so don’t worry about your academics during this time. It also isn’t necessary to do too much preparation outside of remembering your talking points. Instead, this time gap should be used to relax and get into the right mindset.
Medicine Interviews
If you’re applying to study Medicine, you’ll likely also need to be prepared for Multiple Mini Interviews (MMIs). Oxford and Cambridge don’t use this interview format, but many other medical schools do, so you’ll likely need to complete at least on during this period (although other medical school interviews can be held as late as March).
What To Do In The New Year
Once you’ve completed your interviews, your application will most likely be finished. All of the hard work preparing for each component of the application is over, so what do you do now? Firstly, we need to consider what can happen to some applicants, particularly those applying for Cambridge:
Cambridge Winter Pool
At Cambridge, applicants may sometimes be placed in the “Winter Pool” in January before offers are released. This means that the college you applied to has decided not to accept you but has placed your application in a pool of rejected applicants for other colleges to review. Not every rejected applicant is placed in the pool, but it’s not too common to be put in it.
If you are in the pool, there’s a high chance you’ll be accepted into another college at the university. Some will be fully rejected, while a small number of others will be asked to attend more interviews before being admitted. This is uncommon, but it’s something that you should be prepared for. The interviews will be in the same format as your previous ones, so there isn’t anything new to prepare for.
Oxford colleges sometimes send applications between themselves, but there isn’t a formal process for this like the Winter Pool.
The most important thing that happens in January regarding your application is receiving your offer. Oxford and Cambridge each have set days for this, and while there isn’t anything you need to prepare for, it’s still good to know these dates so you can be ready to learn your outcome.
With the pressure that comes from waiting for these results, it may be hard to focus on your schoolwork. However, this is the point where it’s really important to get started on intensive revision for your final exams. Applicants need to meet very high grade requirements to earn their place, so you should start as early as possible to ensure you’re prepared for this last step.
Thankfully, this is now the only thing you need to work on, so you’ll have all the time you need to revise for each of your subjects. Aim to spend about as much time as you did when you were preparing your application, but be sure not to overwork yourself during these last few months.
Once you’ve finished your exams, you’ll finally have some time to relax and wait for your results. When you know that you’re going to Oxford or Cambridge, then you’ll be able to start preparing for the move so that you will be ready to go in October!
Cambridge STEP
There is one specific case in which the application process continues after you’ve received your offer. If you’re applying to study Mathematics at Cambridge, you will need to complete the Sixth Term Examination Papers (STEP). This is a series of two mathematics tests that need to be sat in June, but you will only need to complete them if you get an offer.
Preparing for this will be the same as any other admissions test, although it may be best to focus on this once you’ve finished your final exams. The test covers mathematics, so most of the required knowledge will have been covered in your school curriculum.
Final Preparation Tips
Now that you know how to balance your application preparation with your school work and revision, let’s finish with some general tips that will help you successfully get through both of these tasks:
Create a Timetable
No preparation can be successful without comprehensive planning to ensure you know how to get from point A to point B. A custom timetable will be an invaluable tool for you during these months, as you’ll be able to keep everything organised instead of wasting time deciding what needs to be done.
The timetable doesn’t need to detail the exact things you’ll be working on for each hour of every day, but it can be helpful just to know that you’ve made time to work on your Personal Statement or school revision. However, the more detail you include, the more you’ll be prepared for each session that comes.
Find Appropriate Resources
While your school should provide all the necessary textbooks and equipment for revising each of your subjects, there are plenty of resources that will benefit your Oxbridge application too. You’ll have to find these yourself, though we have some recommendations for what you should be looking for.
For Personal Statements, there are plenty of guides available that detail effective writing techniques. However, we feel the best resources are example Personal Statements from previously successful Oxbridge applicants. We have a full collection of these available at UniAdmissions, so feel free to view them and see what a successful Oxbridge Personal Statement looks like.
For Admissions Tests, the most important thing to have access to is practice questions. There are some free question banks and past papers available, but these don’t have many questions or do not reflect the current exam format. Independent question banks are also available which contain far more questions (with worked solutions) but will generally require a fee. See which options suit you the most and make the investment if you feel it’s worth it.
As for interviews, try to find discussions about the interviews for your course, as well as general advice for Oxford and Cambridge interviews. Some colleges will publish videos of example interviews that provide a deeper insight into the process and the types of questions asked.
Seek Support
While some people like to revise independently, many others enjoy working as a group. It makes the process more enjoyable and allows you to ask questions when you’re stuck. However, there are aspects of the Oxbridge application process that can’t be done independently anyway.
For example, it’s best to get feedback on your Personal Statement before submitting it, so you will need to seek help from someone you trust. The same goes for conducting a mock interview or marking an essay you have written, so never be afraid to ask for help from family, friends or mentors.
Learn Effective Revision Techniques
It can be easy to get stuck in the way we like to do things, even if it’s not the most effective way of working. There are plenty of different revision strategies that you could experiment with, such as interleaving and compounding, and we have a guide dedicated to tips that will help you revise more effectively.
That concludes our guide to managing your academics and Oxbridge application. We hope that you’ll now be able to effectively prepare for both of these major milestones and get your place at Oxford or Cambridge.
Remember that each of these tasks is equally important, so don’t disregard one just because you feel you don’t have time or find it more difficult. Use the ideas provided in the guide to plan your preparation timeline and prepare for everything at the right time. If you find yourself struggling, just remember all the benefits that will come from being an Oxbridge graduate and you’ll realise that the work is worth it!
This balance can sometimes feel hard to maintain when you spend so much time at school and may have so few resources for your Oxbridge application. If you’re looking to boost your chances of earning your offer, UniAdmissions’ Full-Blue Programme is perfect for you. Through unlimited one-to-one tuition, extensive resources, live courses and more, we consistently triple our students’ chance of success in their Oxbridge application. You can learn more about our programmes here or book a free consultation to discover how you can enrol.
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