I recently had an interview for Harvard that ended up being around 3 hours long. All of my other interviews have been about an hour to an hour and a half, and I’ve never heard of an interview being this long. Has anyone else had an experience like this?
Mine was about an hour, but then the interviewer had to get back to work… but 3 hours, you must have had tons to talk about (which is most likely a very good thing)! I wouldn’t worry about it at all
My sons interview was about 2 hours (1 hour 40 minutes).
I’ve always tried to cut the interview off at around :40, give or take. Once, I think, I went for about an hour with a candidate. I can’t imagine interviewing someone for 3 hours. I would take it as a good sign.
Of course it’s a good sign. But no one does alumni interviewing unless they enjoy talking with smart, engaging high school seniors, and the Harvard admissions pool is chock full of smart, engaging high school seniors with good social skills. Good interviews are the norm, and great ones not at all uncommon. If everyone with a good interview were accepted, the admission rate would be 80%, not 4%.
About a decade ago – i.e., when Harvard’s admission rate was much higher than it is now – there was an article in The Atlantic (I think) by a fairly famous journalist (which one, obviously, I don’t recall) who regularly did alumni interviews for Harvard. He loved doing it, loved meeting the applicants, admired most of them, took great care to write detailed interview reports. He claimed that in over a decade of interviewing, no one he had interviewed had ever been accepted.
Bad interviews are much more important than good ones. A really bad interview can disqualify even a top candidate. I’m not certain a really good interview helps much. There are so many of them, they don’t really distinguish one candidate from the next.
@JHS I was just contacted for a second interview with my regional Harvard admissions officer. Do you have an idea of what this could mean (first interview lost, bad interview, etc.? I couldn’t find much info on second interviews, other than those with a second alumni. I’m not sure what else they could be curious about, as my alumni interviewer pretty much covered everything imaginable in his 3 hour interview. Also, could the alumni interviewer being a “personal friend of the admissions director,” as he put it, have anything to do with being contacted for a second interview?
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/20299283#Comment_20299283
(How I answered the same question a few weeks ago.)