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My Big UCAS Writeup

30/7/20249 min read

Here’s the big writeup of everything I have to say on this topic, paying particular note to things that apply to Engineering at Cambridge.

Personal Statement

My tactics for writing a good personal statement were:

  • Select wider reading that mirrors course content
  • Demonstrate my ability to think independently
  • Draft & Redraft for eternity

Reading other personal statements made me far better at writing mine and I expect it to be the same for you.

Remember, your reflections on the work you read matter more than the number of books read.

Aerospace specific

In year 10, I kind of thought of aerospace engineering as “mechanical engineering with planes”. Maybe this is true in some places, but not for all. Imperial has a hefty fluid mechanics module and core modules about Propulsion/Flight Dynamics. Hence, I spent time reading “How Wings Work”, “Life at Low Reynolds Numbers” and “A History Of Aerodynamics”.

Research your courses. They will be different in meaningful ways.

Interviews

A couple of you have been asking about interviews, here’s a big writeup:

I suspect that I had relatively easy interview questions because my year was the first year of online interviews, and a lot of sixth form was disrupted due to covid. Many of my friends had different interview experiences. I personally was not asked anything about my personal statement, but I know people who were only asked about their personal statement.

There’s a couple of questions interviewers are thinking about:

  • Do you have a good grasp of the topics you are learning at school? Can you only ‘think in equations’ or do you understand how to use ratios effectively?
  • Are you genuinely interested in the course? Do you have wider knowledge of engineering?
  • Are you going to benefit from the supervision system at Cambridge? Can you articulate what you don’t understand?

There’s a massive breadth of content they could ask about. My interview began with using the ideal gas law to find the force on a fridge door, then we had a graph sketching question on SHM and finished with a question comparing different fuels.

Easy questions ask you to recall something (eg. What does each term mean in pv=nRT?), and following questions build up from there (eg. If I seal a fridge shut and turn it on, what’d be the final pressure in the fridge? What’s the force on the fridge door?). Questions towards the end of each section can get quite difficult indeed (eg. What assumption have we made that is invalid?).

A good interviewer will push you to achieve your best, and that means that you may have questions which you struggle to answer. Don’t stress about it.

Interviews: Addendum

After I matriculated at Cambridge, I had a formal dinner with the man who interviewed me, and asked him about the admissions process:

  • His policy on personal statements was summarised reluctantly as “Standard Credit”. Above a certain threshold of quality, your personal statement does not matter.
  • If a student mentions something the interviewer knows in detail, the interviewer is very likely to ask further questions about the topic

This advice is probably specific to studying Engineering at Cambridge, and might not apply if you are studying something else.

Admissions Assessment Prep

I’m actually not sure how much assessment prep I did. I probably did every ENGAA paper I could find (only two or three had released at the time?).

Here’s every link I could find:

ENGAA:

I-want-to-study-engineering:

TMUA:

That is ~80 hours of tough content, and you are nowhere near going to finish this.

Apparently there’s no ENGAA there’s ESAT now? I guess my knowledge may be out of date.

Choosing a College

This website used to be a good source of info:

Don’t spend more than a day choosing your college. Most people enjoy the college they end up in.

What is Engineering at Cambridge

General information:

1st year syllabus:

2nd year syllabus:

Here’s a student run website which (unofficially) distributes papers and solutions for Engineering at Cambridge. I get the impression that the department turns a blind eye to the website as it doesn’t distribute solutions to acessed coursework content. I think it’s a useful resource to you now just so you can appreciate how the course is structured, and get a look at Examples papers.

Go to the IA section of the website, that is all 1st year content.

Note that the website has all four years of Engineering course (IA, IB, IIA, IIB in order) as engineering databooks (click the down arrow, and then databooks)

Fun drama: While the Engineering Department doesn’t actually care too much about the website, the University does. They’ve hired a crack team (the “UIS”) of cybersecurity experts — ex-police, financial security types — to track down people who distribute university’s content. I met a guy who got a knock on the door from the UIS. I felt like a North-Korean dissident talking to him in the canteen. He told me how they can see EVERYTHING, about how he’d tripped an alert and how they’d done a full investigation on him. They’re dead set on finding the CamCribs admin, and allegedly have implemented more tracking features during the website redesign. It’s kindof unfair to say that the UIS runs a spyware platform, because many of the tracking features they run are genuinely useful. Lecturers can see what sections of recordings are replayed the most (suggesting further clarity needed), which PDFs are accessed the most and finely control when they are accessed. But yeah, that’s the “drama” on the UIS. Not too useful, but I just find this very funny.

How does pooling work?

Alot of people ask me about this, and I have to supress my urge to scream: DO NOT WORRY ABOUT POOLING.

The pooling system is designed to make applications fair, and make college choice less strategic. The only real difference is that pooled candidates don’t get their first choice college. You don’t really need to worry.

TLDR:

  • Cambridge don’t want people to choose colleges based on application success rate.
  • However, some colleges have significantly more applicants than others.
  • Colleges which are oversubscribed (but have smart candidates) will put the excess candidates into “the pool”
  • Other colleges will poach candidates from the pool

IF you get pooled (maybe a quarter of candidates do), AND you are really worried, you can read cambridge’s guide to the pool:

Supercurriculars

Aside from what’s mentioned on my personal statement, I’d really recommend the ‘datagenetics’ blog. It’s REALLY good for random mathematical puzzles; I could spend all day on this site, but only maybe 10% are pure engineering content. I’m particularly recommending you this because the engineering content usually involves derivations. I remember reading these posts about windmills, and Ackermann steering:

Naturally, I have to link the Cambridge list of recommended reading (which I expect you’ve seen). It should be noted that a number of these books are freely available online:

There’s alot to be said about local libraries too - you’ll come across books on nicher topics which definitely help you stand out. In terms of video content, Khan Academy cannot be beaten if you’re trying to learn fundamental engineering theory.

I’m quite careful with recommending Youtube channels because alot of them fall under ‘Infotainment’ rather than educational. Channels like ‘Mark Rober’, ‘Vsauce’ and ‘Smarter Every Day’ serve factual content in a very engaging manner, but I don’t think they’re acedemically dense enough. I would reccommend 3Blue1Brown, Scott Manley (aerospace specific), and perhaps ‘Real Engineering’ (although I haven’t watched any recent videos).

my favorite is the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation — Mentee

I think you might be interested in the idea of specific impluse. It’s a measure of the ‘miles per gallon’ for a rocket engine. I find it very interesting that maximizing ‘miles per gallon’ inherently makes your engine less energy efficient, and that different types of rocket engine have different typical values of specific impluse.

i don’t understand how lnx differentiates to 1/x — Mentee

This is one of my “cool integral party tricks” I show people new to calculus. I first learnt it from a fantastic (and FREE book) “Calculus Made Easy”. Nowadays the book is available as a sleek website.

Party trick:

Here’s a cool extract that elegantly shows why e^x differentiates to itself:

i wonder how objects fracture over time and how exponential cracks are to the destruction of the whole structure — Mentee

oh boy are you in for a treat. The derivation for this is so slick. I’ve gone through the hassle of finding a PDF of “Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down” for you

Open Page 75, and read the two pages under the subsection “Griffith – or how to live with cracks and stress concentrations”

Seeing as you have “Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down” open, you could also read into more pressure-vessel analysis.

Read from the section “Pipes and pressure vessels” on page 88 from the same PDF.

Mentee expressed interest in taking apart consumer electronics

If you’re looking for more personal statement content, here’s a project idea: Use a “logic analyser” (effectively an oscilloscope that only reads digital values) to investigate consumer electronics

  • Officially supported logic analysers cost in the three figure range, but I used a £15 Amazon knock-off and it worked fine.
  • I recommended using Sigrok and Pulseview as described this tutorial: https://youtu.be/dobU-b0_L1I?si=dXBkly40x9bGICAh

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