This paper is an attempt to assess aptitude for simultaneous interpreting by taking into consideration those skills that have been developed by students during their previous educational and formative (in the widest sense of the term) experiences and that are deemed to be part of an interpreter’s performance as has been empirically demonstrated. These skills fall into two main categories: cognitive skills and linguistic skills. The first category includes those abilities related to the fulfillment of tasks such as comprehending, analyzing, anticipating, reprocessing and summarizing a text, whereas the second category contains those abilities that indicate a perfect linguistic competence in the mother- and working tongues (among which syntactical, stylistic and terminological competences).