<p>So at my Brown interview, my interviewer was a very intimidating former state senator who wrote down every. single. thing. that i said.
We talked about my interests…I said I’m into photography. She asked if I had sent any to Brown. I said no…she asked if I was part of my school’s newspaper…no…do you develop your own photos? No…I felt like an idiot. I had to admit that it was an interest where I was educating myself and kind of sharing things with friends and family.
And then we talked about books. She asked what I’d read lately, and I said Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice, failing to mention they were for school. She questioned my interest in British Romance and I came up with nothing…I just babbled about interesting social situations and crap. Ugh! It’s my first choice too…when I said that she said “Yeah it’s everyone’s first choice from around here.” Fail.</p>
<p>Cornell Interviewer: “Well, do you want me to tell an admissions official anything additional?”
Me" No… If I get rejected by Cornell, Oh well."</p>
<p>whoops… hehe. The interviewer was nice, but a little creepy.</p>
<p>I mentioned to my Brown interviewer that I was not completely serious academically my first two years of high school, saying that my junior and senior years have been better… :</p>
<p>Her: So what made the change?
Me: Well, I had this one girlfriend who was really smart and…I couldn’t let her be smarter than me!</p>
<p>Her: <em>semi-offended face</em> If you said that at Brown they’d kill you.
Me: (thinking) sh**, that’s not what I meant!</p>
<p>The interview was decent other than that stupid comment. The interviewer was very charming and engaging and conversational.</p>
<p>Well this wasn’t awkward persay, but i hit it off on a good note when I mentioned my love of Star Wars. He high-fived me :)</p>
<p>yo man, that’s funny. but i think those mistakes happened because you was thinking of that interview which i don’t know how to name it. maybe horrible, maybe not. but whatever it is you should have hope. hope is the only mankind tool, when he/she can’t do anything more.</p>
<h2>i hope they don’t mention these horrible mistakes.</h2>
<p>i remembered my first interview, but still not as bad as yours. i just forgot to mention some of my important things.
from then i always write the topics i want to talk about. do it can also be helpful.</p>
<p>So this wasn’t exactly during an interview, but awkward nonetheless…
I was waiting to go into an interview along with a group of complete strangers. Someone was mumbling about how much he wanted chocolate, so I took out a piece from my purse and offered it to him. This girl and I joke about my “Mary Poppins purse”…until I said something like, “Yeah, I have all kinds of random things in here. It’s practically a pharmacy”. The joking and laughing ceased and she looked at me weirdly for a few seconds before staring fixedly at the wall beside her. I just then realized that I’d said pharmacy instead of department or super store like I’d meant to…I decided, however, not to make things more awkward by being all, “Wait, no, I meant that I have like, band-aids and alcohol swabs and stuff, like a first aid kit kind of pharmacy…not like a drugstore pharmacy”. And now about ten kids are probably going around talking about the drug dealer who was interviewing for a scholarship. COOL. At least the interviewers didn’t hear this! :)</p>
<p>I fixed an interview at a coffee shop that I later found out [while driving around looking for it] no longer existed.</p>
<p>We interviewed at a McDonald’s instead.</p>
<p>[To be fair, though, my interviewer was very nice about the whole thing so it wasn’t as awkward as it could have been.]</p>
<p>My Princeton interviewer called my house about 2 hours ago. I thought she was a telemarketer for magazines at first and pretended not to be there. Then, through her thick accent, she was just like, “Please tell ksarmand to call back to set up an interview for Princeton.” </p>
<p>And when I called her back, there was an (appropriately) awkward silence when she recognized my voice. :o</p>
<p>During my Yale interview, after a long mature discussion, he asked while I was standing up, “if you could have one superpower, what would you have?” I said, to go backwards and forwards in time to visit historical events. I was really thinking “to go backwards in time so I could think of a better superpower.”
But that’s the most awkward interview that I had and I’ve had interviews for Trinity, Middlebury, Dartmouth, Harvard (2- alum & adcom), Princeton, UChicago, Vanderbilt, Washington and Lee, UMBC.
It did get kind of awkward when my Vanderbilt interviewer (22, graduated last year), mentioned that my friend who was joint-majoring at Peabody College next year would get a lot of “play” because everyone there was a future southern housewife getting her MRS. My Vanderbilt interviewer being a she.</p>
<p>I love this threat…it is full of awkard stories </p>
<p>Before the interview my parents told me, if the interviewer asked me what did my father for a living, to say that he is an agriculture bussinessmen so as she could thing i’m not from an isolated place and that i cannot afford a university and so on…they though it could impress more than saying he is just a farmer (he is just a farmer). I told them that i didn’t think she could ask me that because it is irrelevant for the interview and it is supposed to be about me not my family.
The first questions where just where are you from, what do you study, where does your father work at…yes…where does your father work at!:
Me: He is a fa…agriculture bussinessmen (uuhh)
Int: aja…
Well, at the end of the interview when i could asked her some questions about the univesity, she told me that we had to talk a bit about the admission aid because it was important and i was like (ok?¿?¿). so she told me that his father was also a farmer !! (not an agriculture bussinessmen). sh**t… i was caught. i felt like an idiot.</p>
<p>A little bit into the discussion, my interviewer asks me what my parents do for a living, where they went for college. I explain that my mother works at a school-based health center, writes grants, and then he asks me what my father does.</p>
<p>Me: Well, he’s a retired engineer; he used to work at P&G.
Interviewer: Nice. So what does he do now?
Me: He plays solitaire a lot. Goes golfing. Ummm, he’s on a lot of committees. Like the Urban League. And Cincinnatus. <em>Wonders if it’s a good idea to say NAACP or not</em>
Interviewer: What do those groups do?
Me: Um. Actually, I don’t really know. Social… stuff, I think. They… help… people… <em>crumble</em> He never really brings it up. I would come in to Human Geography last year and my teacher would say he’d seen my father on TV, on the sorts of stations that show city council meetings, and it would be the first time I’d heard of it.
Interviewer: Okay…</p>
<p>Eurgh. I looked so ignorant and incurious.</p>
<p>The only other awkwardness comes about if interviewers ask me about my family. I say I have 3 siblings, which makes it sound like I grew up with them, which isn’t true, and I don’t like implying falsehoods. But I don’t really want to bother explaining that the oldest two lived with their respective mothers. It’s sort of obvious when I say my parents moved here and met about 25 years ago and have been married for 23 years and then I say I have a 33 year old sister and a 31 year old brother.</p>
<p>I thought the most awkward moment would be when my Brown interviewer invited himself over my house…turned out he was the coolest of my five interviews. Most awkward moment easily goes to Harvard, who disagreed with everything I said. However, I was able to “pique” his interest so he went into his office for an abnormally long time as I listened to his kids play the xylophone…he came out with a list of all the kids he had interviewed over the years and he compared me to each one from my town. Harvard-esque?</p>
<p>I had my Yale interview yesterday and he asked me the most ridiculous questions haha
especially because I had my Duke interview last week who was the nicest and most chill person ive ever met. All she asked me was Why Duke and then we just talked on and on casually. </p>
<p>Okay I walked into the Cafe at 12:30 where i was supposed to meet my Yale interview. The interview started at 1. Turns out the guy was at the cafe from like 2 hours ago… </p>
<p>Anyways I shook his hand, I sit down and the first thing he says is “This is gonna be a very hard interview just saying” and im sitting there like “*****”.
He asks me like “If you were Obama or a prime minister of another country what policy would you conduct to alleviate the recession” and in depth questions like that and ofcoure I BSed every single one of em. haha I mean the interview went alright because I didnt have awkward pauses but he was like so annoying ugh. </p>
<p>He basically made me not wanna go to the school lol and made it seem more snobbish than I already thought it was.
then at the end he was like “well, if i applied now, i know im not getting in.” real encouraging right?
at least that was my last interview.</p>
<p>My princeton interviewer was really sweet and we had a lot of common ground, but it seemed she expected me to ask her questions about the school. I have a good friend who goes there and gabs about every detail about Princeton so there was nothing I DIDN’T know about. The silence that ensued when she asked me whether I have any questions about Princeton, saying that this is a good opportunity to learn more from someone who went there, was awkward, to say the least.</p>
<p>Furthermore, her two boys were beating each other up on the floor right next to us. She kept interrupting the interview to tell them to stop, but they didn’t, so eventually she literally grabbed them off each other and carried them out of the room. It was a bit awkward/funny, but she was very good with them and the interview was fantastic. She even gave me a hug at the end and told me that I am going to have a great time at Princeton. Despite the awkwardness, I think I handled myself well. --sheepish grin–</p>
<p>Wow! Hilarious thread! I live in Ghana, so I haven’t had the opportunity to have an interview. I did a written one at the Education USA center in Ghana,(along with about 133 other students, and it went very well) where your interview report is compiled and sent to the schools you applied to. Thank God!</p>
<p>I love this thread. </p>
<p>I think my ‘awkward’ moment was more silly than embarassing, but I was coming down from the office of my interviewer in the admissions house, and some students stopped us on the steps and asked us to say ‘cheese’. Apparently it was pictures time or something because we both had to stop dead in our tracks and smile. Then later that day at the big dinner, they played all the student pictures on slide, and there I was standing, awkwardly balanced between steps and grinning like a goof with my interviewer- broadcast to the 100+ kids and professors eating at the dinner. It was highly entertaining…the school had other pictures that were just as random as well…me and a few other students had the first interviews of the day, and the night before the school held a party for the propsies. I didn’t go, but a few other kids had partied until 2 am and arrived for interviews at about 8. Their pictures were taken too, in all their sleep deprived glory. </p>
<p>It was pretty fun.</p>
<p>Another interview began with a ten minute discussion of how much my interviewer liked rom comedies, (my interviewer being a guy) and whether we’d ever dressed up in costumes for our favorite show/book/film characters before (we had.) That part wasn’t awkward. What was awkward was when we noticed (after the actual interviewing) the next girl was there and waiting. Whoops.</p>
<p>I had to explain to the guy what nerdcore hip hop was ><
“It’s err… uhmm… ‘funny’ hip hop… ‘witty’ rap… ‘parody’ rap?”</p>
<p>Mine’s not from an interview but rather an audition (I’m auditioning for BFA Acting programs) for Boston University’s CFA. Before the pre-audition informational session, I get to talking with one of my fellow auditioners. She mentions that she’s also looking at Vassar, and how much she loves it. Duly noted…</p>
<p>So then the auditor escorts us all into a room and tells us to talk amongst ourselves as the other auditioners come in. But nobody talks, so this dialogue ensues:</p>
<p>Auditor: Come on guys, talk! … what actors do you like?
Girl: I’m in LOVE with Meryl Streep.
Me: No WONDER you want to go to Vassar!!</p>
<p>… oh, unintentionally subterfuge, how you slay me.</p>
<p>o_0 oh bogface…how that girl must hate you. LOL.</p>
<p>Funnily enough, she didn’t seem to care. I apologized profusely afterwards and she was really cool about it. It was my first audition so I was super nervous and she was pretty chill. I hope she gets in, she deserves it! Hah.</p>