CASE STUDY: MIT interviews really that important in admissions?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1

<p>"We urge you to make every effort to have an interview. Why? Because your interview gives us a vivid sense of you as a person and how you would fit at MIT - something the paper application alone can never match. In fact, last year, of eligible applicants, we admitted 15% of those who had an interview (or who had their interview waived), but only 5% of those who chose not to interview." </p>

<p>from: MIT</a> Admissions: Interviews / Educational Counselors (ECs)</p>

<p>How true is this?</p>

<p>Class of 2013 applicants: Let's try and work together to get a sense of how much the MIT interview might impact decisions. (Disclaimer: Keep in mind that the posters on CC are probably not a totally accurate representation of the entire applicant pool, which is why I've chosen to treat this as a case study of sorts.)</p>

<p>Please include the following info if you'd like to participate: whether or not you had an interview, if yes, how did it go, if no, did you get it waived? if you got it waived, what was your reason for getting it waived? what date did you submit your application? and your admissions decision.</p>

<p>I'll start!! Thanks for your help!=)</p>

<p>Interview: No, didn't try to waive. Did schedule an interview three times, but it kept snowing so I kept having to cancel. Silly me, I should have shown more commitment.</p>

<p>Date submitted app: January 4th, 2AM EST</p>

<p>Decision?: Waitlist</p>

<p>~<em>~</em>~<em>~</em>~*</p>

<p>In case you're wondering, yes I am trying to figure out if my lack of an interview and submitting my app late is why I got waitlisted, or if it's a bigger reason. Thanks again for your help though, because this info should be useful for next year's class too!</p>

2

<p>Interview: Yes. It went very very well. My EC continually said he was very impressed with what I had done and that I was one of the top candidates he had ever interviewed (he had been doing this for quite a while). I left feeling very good about the entire process.</p>

<p>Date Submitted App; October 15th, 11 PM ish</p>

<p>Decision: Admitted</p>

3

<p>Interview: This was my first college interview and went quite well; I think it lasted for 2 hours or so and she was very interested in what I was doing, my passions, etc. It was fantastic.</p>

<p>*Date submitted App: * December 31 or Jan 1st can't remember.</p>

<p>Decision?: Admitted.</p>

4

<p>Interview: Yes, went pretty well IMO. I don't really remember any specifics, suffice it to say that I think the interview was neither really bad nor particularly outstanding. </p>

<p>Submitted app: Late December (29-30?)</p>

<p>Decision: Rejected :(</p>

<p>I don't think your late submission had anything to do with it. After all, they spend the better part of January just processing all the applications that they receive, the fact that yours was a day or two late is almost certainly unimportant. Interviewing might have pushed you into admitted status though.</p>

5

<p>Interview: yes went really well - about 1 hr.
Submitted app: late december
Decision: admitted (w/ lower than average stats)</p>

6

<p>Interview: Yes, but I don't think it went very well. I don't really remember it exactly but I remember him asking about why I wanted to go to MIT specifically, but we talked about stuff beforehand so it was more like, "I know partly why already, but why do you want to go to MIT," and I stumbled over that and just said something about UROPs. And then I told him my educational and career goals and he said that they didn't really go together very well. But I think he might have been impressed with me knowing about course numbers already, and then my online class. And for a while after my interview, I was really worried that I came off a nerd that programmed all day but didn't really have any friends. I can't remember anything bad that happened, but it definitely didn't feel like 2 hour conversation where I find a best friend like how a lot of interviews on CC seem to sound like.</p>

<p>Date Submitted App: November 1st</p>

<p>Decision: Accepted</p>

7

<p>Interview: Went very well - long, talked about a lot of stuff, he seemed impressed</p>

<p>Submitted app: 3 minutes before EA deadline</p>

<p>Decision: Accepted</p>

8

<p>Interview: no, and I didn't even try to get it waived. </p>

<p>Submitted app: 2 days before EA deadline</p>

<p>Decision: accepted</p>

9

<p>Interview: went very very good~1.5 hrs or so.</p>

<p>Submitted: 22nd October, 2008 (applied EA)</p>

<p>Decision: Rejected (after EA DEFERRAL)</p>

<p>Going to Caltech now WHOO-HOOOOOOO!!!</p>

10

<p>Interview:I honestly didn't even know how to set it up...</p>

<p>Date submitted app: Late December</p>

<p>Decision?: Accepted</p>

11

<p>Interview: Yes. It went well but not amazing. It was both my first interview and her first interview, so it was awkward on both our parts at moments but overall it was fun. </p>

<p>Submitted: November 1st... I procrastinate... and my application still ended up horribly and iIwish I had just waited for regular decision and sent the same essays and such that i sent for my RD schools which I actually liked. </p>

<p>Decision. Deferred then rejected. </p>

<p>So am I Synchrotron.. at least assuming the FA is what it should be from what I calculated from the info on their FA website haha. Maybe we'll end up chillin' in Pasadena!</p>

12

<p>Interview: scheduled in october for regular action; 1 hour; pretty standard questions. interviewer smiled a lot, but that's usual.</p>

<p>Date submitted App: December 30/ or 31st. </p>

<p>Decision?: RD Admitted.</p>

13

<p>Interview: amazingly awesome</p>

<p>Submitted: October ?</p>

<p>Decision: EA admitted</p>

14

<p>Yep Balaylay, if I don't get into Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton, then we will definitely end up in Pasadena dude.</p>

<p>Caltech is so awesome WOOT-WOOT.</p>

15

<p>Interview: Nov 11. Interviewer and I could not connect, because we had different interests. But he seemed impressed by how much I knew about MIT and how "interested" I was ... I asked ALOT of questions. Lasted 1 hr 10 min.</p>

<p>Also: Interviewer was amazingly tired and disinterested in having an interview in general.</p>

<p>Submitted: January 3, 2009 at 7:30 PM EST</p>

<p>Decision: Rejected</p>

16

<p>I thought my interview was horrible--second worst after Yale.</p>

<p>I got deferred EA then accepted RA.</p>

17

<p>Interview: NO! I had no clue about the Dec. 10th deadline to schedule one. I was so bummed, I really thought I wouldn't get in if I didn't have an interview. I emailed my EC ASAP and she never emailed me back. I then called her a week later which forced her to email me back and she said that she wasn't willing to interview anymore :(. I emailed MIT in like late January or something and told them that I tried to get an interview but that my EC wasn't interviewing anymore (I didn't tell them that I missed the 12/10 deadline!) and they responded with a fairly standard reply. </p>

<p>Submitted: ~~Dec. 26-28?</p>

<p>Decision: Accepted RA!</p>

18

<p>Interview: I think that my interview had a very important impact in the overall application process. It brought out my best intellectual and personal qualities. My interviewer was very straightforward but he was awfully nice and it was a sort of two-way street. He told me what he thought of MIT before, what he thinks of it now, how it has evolved over the last 30 years into arguably the finest math and science school in the world. Overall I benefited from the interview because it cleared up the doubt of why I was applying to MIT. I realized that there was more to that three letter acronym than meets the eye. I was also able to "excuse" myself for my less-than-stellar SAT scores while at the same time I pointed out qualities that I missed in my application such as my multilingual skills and my love of the humanities and not just the sciences. It was an overall magnificent experience and it made applying to MIT a very fun and enriching experience.</p>

<p>Application Submitted: ~Dec. 14th-15th. Now I missed the Dec. 10th deadline because I frankly did not know about it but I e-mailed MIT and then about 1 week after I got a call from my interviewer. He very willingly agreed to give me an interview without any reproach for having missed the deadline.</p>

<p>Decision: Accepted (RD)</p>

19

<p>Interview: It was amazing. The interviewer seemed interested and impressed the whole way through, and at one point joked "Are you sure you don't want to apply to be a professor?"</p>

<p>Application submitted: January 1st, 9 PM or so. I had it ready at least the day before, but my mother made me wait to review it.</p>

<p>Decision: Waitlisted :(</p>

20

<p>Interviews play very little role. The Interview Process exists for two reasons:</p>

<p>1) To check very basic information on the candidate (race is one of them)</p>

<p>2) To give rabid alumni the feeling that they are contributing something to their alma mater</p>

<p>Think about it. Any lunatic can become an alumni interviewer. The admissions office has virtually no control over who can "volunteer" to perform interviews. Usually members of the local alumni group provide the volunteers. There is no way that the admissions office can screen these volunteers for competence as interviewers. So you can have great interviewers who really do a great job, or complete psychos who want to feel like they can terrorize the applicants.</p>

<p>Put a fork in it. The interviews are very low on the admissions totem pole.</p>