<p>I had a uchciago interview, and the interviewer seemed to match my application a lot. We both have similar academic interests and did/planning to do similar ECS and classes in college (Art). My friend got a northwestern interview and his interviewer works for Goldman Sachs (the type of job my friends is into) and did the same program he is planning to do. I wonder, do colleges look at the application before the review process and make an effort to match person interviewing the applicant so they have much to talk about?</p>
<p>I don’t think so. Mostly the interviewers are in the same area as you live, and it’s a coincidence. I doubt the colleges have time to match everyone XD
The same thing happened with my interviewer for MIT. She was a mechanical engineer while I applied for civil engineering, and the interviewer told me her grandfather was a civil engineering. Yeah, we both loved music and art… XD</p>
<p>yeah, but my interviewer had information about my name, email and extra cirricular activites. I was guessing that they might just make a guesssmiate match. Just simply looking at the choices I put down for my Academinc interests would be enough to match for my intervierwer.</p>
<p>Interview assignment is generally done by the regional alumni association, not the actual admission office. Perhaps as the alumni volunteers sign up for interviewees, they can see the listed interests of the students in addition to their area of residence, so that they were able to pick ones that best match their own areas of expertise.</p>
<p>I have just received an email assigning an interview for Harvard yesterday. I was quite surprise to see that my interviewer is also Vietnamese. As I googled, I found out that she also volunteers as a Vietnamese language school, just like me (in fact, I write my essay about it). Does this means anything, or just pure coincidence?</p>
<p>I’ve had two interviews… Harvard and Yale. I play water polo and my Yale interviewer played water polo… Both of them were lawyers (I listed that as what I’d like to do). I put my two top majors as History & Poli Sci… Harvard = History, Yale = Poli Sci… It could of course just be a coincidence because I remembered those specific things but it is odd.</p>
<p>Interesting . . .
Sometimes if you apply to a school like school of engineering or school of business you are likely to have an interviewer who has a lot in common with you</p>
<p>My interviewers (I applied undecided, interested in business, biology, engineering)
- real estate manager?
- lawyer
- financial analyst
- lawyer
- business professor
- finance</p>
<p>OK, maybe they really make effort to match activities/interests…
How about ethnicity? I mean, when I look at the ethnicity of my interviewer, I was like, really?</p>
<p>Ethnicity is probably just because of where you live. They try to match you with people that live close to you, and perhaps you live in an area with a lot of inhabitants of your ethnicity? I know that some schools tell the interviewer the ethnicity to locate them in a Starbucks, for instance. However, I don’t believe they would discriminate like that.</p>
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<p>Race is more likely to be used to pick someone out of a crowd than ethnicity. Ethnicity can be invisible.</p>
<p>I think the similarity is probably typically coincidental, especially when you consider that schools have to find an alumni who has agreed to be an interviewer and who also lives reasonably close to you. That’s usually too small of a pool to match interests.</p>
<p>Just got my second interviewer today. She works in finance an is asian. I am also asian, and listed economics as one possible major on my Brown app. I am doing the IB diploma program, she also did the IB. She was an international student, I am an out-of-state citizen, basically international but holding a US passport. I don’t think this is pure coincidence!!</p>
<p>I applied as an engineer and got a Art History major from Princeton who’s going to back to med school… and there are PLENTY of Princeton alum in my area. But who knows. It would make sense for them to pick at least someone of a similar major, but as for race, ECs, etc… I really doubt it.</p>
<p>^
Just because there are plenty of alumni doesn’t mean they’ve agreed to be interviewers.</p>
<p>^Statistically, it means there are engineer interviewers in my area. Or at the least, math/science.</p>
<p>I’m a college student. Whenever we were asked to host high school students, we were given a list of students with their hometown and academic/extracurricular interests. People usually pick someone who has the same interests, and I can imagine that some areas match interviews in the same way…</p>
<p>There’re multiple alumni interviewers on CC. You can PM any one of them and easily find out how they were matched with their interviewees.</p>
<p>@zhangvict: Is your interviewer’s ethnicity the same as yours? I mean, say you’re Chinese-American, and she is Chinese int’l student? Because that happens to me: I am Vietnamese int’l, she is Vietnamese-American.</p>
<p>I don’t think so. I applied to U Chicago as an English major but was interviewed by an engineering major, I think. We had very little in common unfortunately.</p>
<p>@idonotknow: Well my brown one was a thai int’l student while my uchicago one was a chinese-american one. I am chinese-out-of-state-american.</p>
<p>I’ve done alumni interviews for both Harvard and Swarthmore. For both it was purely geographical. Not a lot of alumni willing to interview in my area, perhaps? I greatly enjoy doing the interviews no matter if there seems to be a “match” between me and the applicant or not.</p>
<p>I’m an alum interviewer. I used to be a little higher up in the alumni interviewer organization and assigned interviewers on the list I had to the students. </p>
<p>My college allows alum interviewers to indicate preferences for the types of students we’d like to interview. I have listed that I like to interview students involved in a particular EC . My interviewer profile lists my UG major. </p>
<p>There is a limited pool of alum interviewers. For reasons I don’t know, in my area, young STEM grads are less likely to volunteer to interview than grads in certain other majors. Many of them express a preference for interviewing STEM oriented kids.</p>
<p>So, back when I was doing the assigning, I would give the STEM interviewers prospective STEM majors. That did NOT mean all the prospective STEM majors got STEM interviewers. I didn’t have enough STEM interviewers to interview all the prospective STEM majors. My college also lets us say how many interviews we’d like to do. I had some who would do 1-2 a year and others who would do a dozen. So that too got factored in. So did distance. So most STEM grads interviewed some non-STEM kids. </p>
<p>The assignments I made had NOTHING to do with the applicant’s “stats.” The most outstanding (on paper) STEM applicant might be one of those who ended up being interviewed by an English major. </p>
<p>If you apply in my area and say you do X EC, the odds are extremely high that I’ll interview you. That’s because I’ve said I like interviewing kids who do that EC . </p>
<p>Some of the interviewers I had on my list self-identify and say they enjoy interviewing students of their own ethnicity. That does NOT mean they will only interview students of their own ethnicity. It does mean that if a kid applies who is from the Dominican Republic —I live in NYC–and I’ve got an alum interviewer who has self-identified as being from the Dominican Republic and expressed a preference for interviewing students from the Dominican Republic, I’ll make a match. Now most of the kids that interviewer talked with would NOT be from the DR, but if I had a DR immigrant kid to assign and an interviewer who self-identified as from the DR and expressed a preference, I’d honor that preference. If I had a Laotian kid, well…I never had a self-identified Laotian interviewer on my list, so there would be no match.</p>
<p>I did this because I wanted to do what I could to make the alum interviewers happy. When alum interviewers enjoy their conversations with young people, it’s more likely that they will continue to interview. It’s even more likely that, while they’ve told me they can only do 2 interviews, they’ll take on one more if I email or call a female engineering grad and say “I’ve got some unassigned applicants and one of them is a young woman who wants to major in engineering. Can you possibly do one more?” If I ask the same young grad “Could you take on one more ?” without saying that the applicant is a prospective female engineering major I’m less likely to get a yes.</p>
<p>So, at least if you interview for my alma mater, it isn’t an accident if you get an alum interviewer with whom you share an ethnicity, a prospective major, an EC or possible occupation. However, if you do NOT get such an interviewer, it says nothing about your chances. A local alum made the match from a limited list of interviewers.</p>
<p>My alma mater left it totally up to the local alum assigning interviews to decide how much of an effort to make in “matching” applicants and interviewers.</p>