<p>-so in an interview for MIT, I google stalked my interviewer the night before and found out he got a phd from the University of Chicago. </p>
<p>So in the interview, when talking about what I was looking for socially in a college, I was like, “yeah, I don’t want a place like UofC. I heard it sucks there.” I realized as soon as I said it that that was dumb. He responded with “uh huh I heard that too.” </p>
<p>-In the Princeton interview, we were trying to coordinate where to meet. He said the Starbucks on Central Street. I assumed Central Street was downtown (a few towns over), so I emailed back and said that I’d meet him at the Starbucks downtown. Then the day of the interview I check google maps and realize Central Street isn’t downtown, so I go to the correct location a couple miles outside downtown. He assumes I’m going to the downtown one, so he goes there and waits for me for like thirty minutes before calling the one on Central Street and finding out I was there (I gave him my cell phone number, but I guess he lost it). Yeah he eventually came and we pretty much talked about the local high school sports for forty minutes.</p>
<p>After reading all 50 pages in the last two days, I thought I’d contribute a few stories of my own.</p>
<p>A friend of mine agreed to have her Duke interview at a Starbucks. She gets there a little early and decides to sit down and wait for her interviewer. As she is waiting, a homeless woman sits down next to her. My friend gets a little flustered by this and tells her that she is meeting someone. The homeless woman leaves and her interviewer eventually arrives. As she is being interviewed, my friend sees the homeless woman outside, mocking her every movement as she is being interviewed. If my friend would raise her arm to emphasize something, so would the woman. Because the window was behind the interviewer, only my friend could see this going on and she was freaking out. At the end, she asked her interviewer to escort her to her car.</p>
<p>As for me, I had a few bad interview experiences, but nothing major: I met my Harvard interviewer in his office and things were going well. He was a really cool guy, although really old and only attended Harvard grad school, and just told me funny stories about his time at Harvard. However, near the end of the interview he turned to a Western-style painting on his wall and asked me, “What is impossible about this picture?” I got pretty freaked out because I could tell he was quizzing me. After a few seconds I finally got it. The horse had a shadow, but it was in the shadow of one of the buildings. He congratulated me and told me so few kids can actually identify that. Needless to say, I still did not get into Harvard.</p>
<p>I, like countless others on this thread, went to the wrong Starbucks and ended up being 10 minutes late to my Brown interview. Then, the interview only went on to last 20 minutes. Luckily, I still got in and am now attending. My three worst interviews were Brown, Dartmouth, and Wash U, but I got into all three. Goes to show everyone that interviews really dont matter all too much.</p>
<p>I was 5 minutes into the interview when I realized that I was telling the Hamilton interviewer why I wanted to go to Colgate. That wasn’t fun… :)</p>
<p>My S’s Harvard interview was great, about 3 hours at a Starbucks in London but as my son composes for ballet, naturally the issue of ballet came up and the interview says that she actually doesn’t enjoy ballet, that she finds it precious and boring. My son takes a Pound coin and puts it on the table and tells the interviewer that the Pound was hers if he couldn’t guess the ONE word she is thinking when he says “ballet.” She takes him up on the offer. He looks at her and says “Nutcracker.” She says, “You’re right.” He pockets the coin and says “and that is why you hate ballet-- modern ballet is NOT Nutcracker.” They both roar in laughter and at the end of the interview she says that she is going push his application hard. When my S told me what happened, my jaw dropped–he is typically a quiet boy, and I was shocked at his chutzpah and told him that I don’t think I’d have had the stones to let my entire interview roll on a stunt like that – he smiled and sang “faint heart never won fair lady.” So off to Harvard he goes-- I’m glad he didn’t listen to his old man.</p>
<p>Interviewer: [after asking several other questions] If you could have a dinner party with three people, fictional or dead, who would they be and why?
Me: Hmm. Let me think about that.
Interviewer: Take your time.
[very long silence in which I realize I have so many answers I can’t narrow it down to three.]
Me: Oh, I hate these questions.
Interviewer: You hate my questions?
Me: Yes. I mean no. No no no. NOT WHAT I MEANT.</p>
<p>I think it went well. She took lots of notes. The time went by quickly and easily. Although I didn’t get any indication of whether she thought I was a good fit or a strong applicant. Crossing my fingers.</p>
<p>this thread is amazing…in an attempt to save it, i’ll share a story… not that great, not a college interview, but oh well…
in an interview that I was doing in order to promote this organziation, the guy asks me- well, what you want to do is great, but how will you ensure that it’s being done?
me- uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
guy-stares at me weird
me- to be honest, no one else that i’ve talked to has ever asked me that. <em>awkward laugh</em> I guess you’re the first one!
guy- <em>confused</em> oh, ok then?! have an answer?
me- uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh</p>
<p>I had an experience similar to whashgood. I was upstate to visit Cornell and Colgate. I checked my email in the hotel room and saw that Hamilton was now doing interviews for the class of 2011. My parents were making me visit so I scheduled an interview. Right in the first question I blurted out that the only reason I was there was to quiet my parents. Oops. I recovered though (I had actually liked Hamilton, so I talked about that). </p>
<p>That interview was just overall awks. I didn’t prep at all, had very few questions for her, I ended a lot of answers with things like “So yeah, that’s pretty much it…”</p>
<p>Most of these are college interviews, however I had an awkward kind of moment during my first interview ever. I was ten years old and applying to middle school.
“What do you like to do in your spare time?”
“Reading.”
“What type of books do you like to read?”
“Anything.”
“Okay, what are you reading at the moment?”
“The City of Ember.”
“I haven’t heard of that before.”</p>
<p>Turns out nowadays all the interviewing girls say Twilight is their favorite book, funny though, the book I was reading when I was ten did turn into a movie.</p>
<p>I used to love this thread, until I realized I have an embarrassing interview story too.</p>
<p>I arrived 10 minutes late and was practically in tears.
I wasn’t really answering any of the questions particularly well. </p>
<p>Inteviewer: So what are some things you like to do in your free time?
Me: I don’t know, I kind of go through phases of being really obsessed with something for a while, then moving on to something else…
Interviewer: So what is it right now?</p>
<p>I had planned to say ‘college searching’, which would be an honest answer. Instead…</p>
<p>Me: Video games.
<em>cringe</em>
Interview: Oh, really, soo… what type of games do you play now?
Me: Uhhm… Pokemon.
<em>cringe</em></p>
<p>Thank god the interviewer was young, and knew what pokemon was, and could name a few and it didn’t turn out to badly, but ughhh.</p>
<p>This was sort of the opposite of the expected embaressing situation, but it was awkward nonetheless, so I shall make my contribution to the thread:</p>
<p>I was interviewing with a current senior at Colorado College, and it was going pretty well, and she was asking me about what fields I was interested in (bio and international relations), and then she tells me that she was a bio major.
I: Yeah, I really don’t find biology very interesting or applicable.
Me:… …
I: Well, I guess I’m glad that people like you do.
And later, I found out that she had also been an IR major for a while, and then switched out of that too.</p>
<p>Also, from the same interview, I had met with a professor there earlier that day, and I was mentioning that (In a “why CC?” question), and she had had him, so her comment is:
I: Did you know that he calls cupcakes fairy cakes because he’s from England?
Me: (thinking she was talking about the fairy cake thing) Oh, I didn’t know that (laugh a bit)
I: You couldn’t tell from his accent that he was from England?!?
Me: Oh, umm, sorry, I thought…</p>
<p>Overall it went pretty well though! So we’ll see, come spring…</p>
In imagining your son’s British accent saying all this I associated your son with Liam Neeson’s boy in Love Actually. A quiet kid that says things like that. </p>
<p>I actually can’t imagine now an 18 year old saying that line. I just have this image of a middle school English lad stuck in my head.</p>
<p>Hehe… yeah I kinda had an embarrassing moment myself… my fault I guess.</p>
<p>I get the feeling Adcoms lurk here, so i’m just going to refrain from mentioning the name…</p>
<p>Yeah so I go like “I love the idea of liberal arts blah blah love the small classes, can’t imagine being in a class of 100 can’t imagine how anyone else can imagine being in a class of 100…”</p>
<p>And my interviewer “Yea… my daughter goes to a big school where classes are that size but personally I’m a small school type of person”</p>
<p>Yeah… I shouldnt have been that dogmatic.</p>
<p>Also, this is more of a question, when I sent a thank you letter to college X I recently realised I did not get a reply because I had a delivery failure thingmmy. Its been over 1.5 months now - too late to say thank you ? Kinda my dream sch. :'(</p>