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<p>lol, you can keep believing that if you want. for the most part you’re incorrect.</p>
<p>“ah i m going for the elite schools and i m a competent candidate…i just thought i should boast to maybe add a little colour you know…”</p>
<p>I’ve been an alum interviewer for Harvard, and I have caught students in the kind of lies that you’re considering. Those students didn’t get in.</p>
<p>It’s important to realize that when it comes to the few colleges that consider things like ECs for admission, the admissions officers and alum interviewers were very active high school students, college students and continue as adults to be very active in their communities. They really do know what it means to do community service and to be a true leader in an organization. Lying about your activities will probably just get you rejected.</p>
<p>Northstar, not all lies are created equal. You may catch me in a lie about volunteering for the NHS but you’re not likely to catch me in a lie about the summer I spent caring for my uncle in upstate New York who was dying from pancreatic cancer and the lessons I learned about courage and perspective. </p>
<p>Stephennn, talk to me in April and I’ll tell you if my creative writing hurt my applications.</p>
<p>“orthstar, not all lies are created equal. You may catch me in a lie about volunteering for the NHS but you’re not likely to catch me in a lie about the summer I spent caring for my uncle in upstate New York who was dying from pancreatic cancer and the lessons I learned about courage and perspective”</p>
<p>You have no idea how small the world is, how knowledgeable interviewers may be, and what kind of lies they are able to catch students in. BTW, one of the students whom I caught in a lie was someone I also had given advice to on CC. Incidentally, the student was randomly assigned to me.</p>
<p>The student never realized that the student had met me on-line, and more than likely, the student also never realized that I had caught the student in lies. I didn’t say, “I know you are lying”. I just went on with the interview, and put the info about the lying in the report.</p>
<p>It is amazing what coincidences can happen. A few years ago, someone posted on CC that their child was interviewing at an out of town college and ended up interviewing right after a classmate who had lied to the interviewer, saying that the classmate held a school office that the other student happened to really have. Neither student had known that the other had planned to interview at that college. So you never know…</p>
<p>OCT, I have to agree with NSM. I quit a camp counseling job, leaving the woman in charge in the lurch, but I didn’t care. I just wanted out of that job. I was polite and as professional as a 16yo could be, but the bottom line was I quit right after someone else had quit and she was stuck trying to hire two counselors as this residential camp in two days.</p>
<p>Fast forward one year: Guess who was the committee chair I interviewed with for a big scholarship. Really, what were the chances?</p>
<p>Northstar: How do you know you dinged the correct person? What if you were wrong? What if you got someone removed from the admission process by mistake? Maybe the person you interviewed just sounded remarkably like the person with whom you spoke but was telling the truth. That gives me a new idea for an essay: I will write about the time I applied for admission into this selective private high school and was confused for someone else in a very important interview. The interviewer who made the mistake then went out of her way to blackball me from the school, while the one who really lied was accepted and went on to greatness. Thanks for the new idea!</p>
<p>yeah northstarmom, no offense, but it seems kind of spiteful the way you put catching someone telling a lie (and alarming to me since im applying to schools)</p>
<p>since you didnt verify that lie, can you explain your reasoning (or if you dont mind, explain the nature of that lie)? i dont want to have an interview and make my interviewer think im lying about being in a club if i like twitch or something lol</p>
<p>^I wouldn’t call reporting someone lying about their life experiences “spiteful.” Plenty of people don’t lie about these things, you know. They actually do reflect upon their own experiences during the college application process in an attempt to reveal something about themselves, rather than trying to come up with something jazzy and impressive. All doubts about how positive NSM was about the student she reported having lied aside (though having been on this site for a while now, I have to say here that I personally think it’s quite possible to be very sure about the identity of people based on what they post on CC, and also that NSM always acts with so much integrity in giving advice that I can’t really see her telling Harvard to throw some kid’s application into the fire on a whim), if the student really did lie, then reporting them was simply the duty of the interviewer. The student should have taken the consequences as a calculated risk when deciding to lie in the admissions process. “Spite” has nothing to do with it. </p>
<p>You’re being paranoid, btw.</p>
<p>Bottom line is, the kind of lie that will stand out enough to help an application will also stand out enough to get caught.</p>
<p>“Northstar: How do you know you dinged the correct person?”</p>
<p>I caught the person lying twice during the interview. No question that the student was lying. One of the lies was about a book that the student said was the student’s favorite book. By coincidence, it happened to be my favorite book, and I had heard the author speak, and I knew the editor. Of course, I was excited that the student loved a book that I happened to love, but when – in response to my questions-- the student started talking about the book, it was very clear that the student had never read the book.</p>
<p>In my narrative to Harvard, I simply stated what the student did such as the fact that the student didn’t display evidence of knowing the content of a book that the student said was their favorite book, a book that I also was very familiar with. Harvard drew its own conclusions.</p>
<p>It was simply coincidence that I had seen the student posting on CC. That had nothing to do with the lying. The student had listed the student’s stats, ECs, gender, city and info about the student’s siblings and parents. The city was my small city. Anyway, only about 20 people apply to Harvard from my region of hundreds of miles each year. There was no question that I had seen the student posting on CC.</p>
<p>Around the time that decisions come out, I also saw the student posting a lot of profanity on CC. I’m not sorry that the student was rejected.</p>
<p>I also caught another student lying about club involvement. The club happened to be a community youth club that I did a lot of volunteer work in and that my own son was the current president of and had been vice president of the year before, and on the board for the two previous years. I had never met the student before, and when I casually asked if the student happened to have ever met my son, the student said “no.” Later, I asked my son if he knew the student and he didn’t.</p>
<p>That student also didn’t get into Harvard.</p>
<p>And then there was the student who early in the interview said his parents hadn’t gone to college, but later in the interview said he’d become interested in astronomy through his dad’s college textbooks. When I asked about the contradiction, the student said he “forgot” that his dad had gone to college.</p>
<p>Another student who didn’t get in.</p>
<p>It is stupid to lie about anything during a college interview.</p>
<p>i think i can safely conclude after this intense debate that lying is a…bad idea. anyways i have good social service ECs…i have more than 400 hours of social service and the recs to back me up. but thanks for saving me from lapsing into a very tempting albeit disastrous course. imagine getting rejected from the college of your dreams and damning your future just because you lied about a book that you had not read!! two things about adcoms- very shrewd and also very spiteful. signing off…</p>
<p>:D NSM has brought home why lying is a bad idea better than I ever could.</p>
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<p>Oh, whine a little harder, why don’t you. There is absolutely nothing spiteful about correctly reporting that someone lied, and there is nothing spiteful about rejecting someone who lies on their application. It’s not like applicants are unaware that they are not supposed to lie, or that getting caught in a lie could mean rejection. Also, for heaven’s sake, nobody’s future is damned because they didn’t get into their dream school - could you be any more melodramatic?</p>
<p>Lying about whether you’ve read a book in ordinary conversation is of little consequence, though I’m not sure why you’d bother. Guess what? This isn’t ordinary conversation. You are presenting your love of this book as part of an application package in a highly competitive process.</p>
<p>I still think this is spiteful. Maybe some adcoms and interviewers have forgotten what it’s like being 17 and sitting in your first college interview. I haven’t even experienced one yet and I’m already scared to death. Now I have to worry that the interviewer is going to tell my dream school that I am a liar if my interpretation of a book differs from her interpretation? </p>
<p>This reminds me of an experience I had in 9th grade when I joined the debate club. We had to stand in front of a group of five or six seniors and give a short speech defending an article they gave us the week before. I must have read the article a dozen times. But the seniors tore me a new one during the question and answer period. My mind went blank several times. An outside observor may have concluded that I didn’t even read the speech since I was so nervous and very intimidated.</p>
<p>Maybe the kid was just nervous and his mind went blank when he realized that you were doubting him. It’s possible. </p>
<p>Maybe I’m naive but I don’t think interviewers should be in the business of telling schools that an applicant is a liar. If you don’t like a person, that’s one thing, but to report that he is a liar seems to me to be going way beyond the duties of an interviewer. It seems pretty spiteful as well.</p>
<p>OCT, it’ll be less scary if you’re not spending a lot of energy trying to remember what you lied about and how to keep your facts straight.</p>
<p>“I still think this is spiteful. Maybe some adcoms and interviewers have forgotten what it’s like being 17 and sitting in your first college interview.”</p>
<p>There’s nothing spiteful about rejecting people who lie during their college interviews. Colleges wish to admit students who are ethical. Part of the purpose of interviews is to learn about the personality and character of the applicant. </p>
<p>Admissions officers and alum interviewers know fully well what it’s like to be in an interview situation. It’s expected that students will be nervous. In fact, most people including highly accomplished adults are nervous during interviews. One doesn’t lose points for nervousness. Lying is very different than is being nervous. Also, if a person becomes a liar when they are under stress, that’s not the kind of person that colleges want to admit. Part of the college experience will definitely be stressful, and someone who loses their integrity when under pressure isn’t the kind of students whom colleges wish to admit.</p>
<p>“Maybe I’m naive but I don’t think interviewers should be in the business of telling schools that an applicant is a liar. If you don’t like a person, that’s one thing, but to report that he is a liar seems to me to be going way beyond the duties of an interviewer. It seems pretty spiteful as well.”</p>
<p>You are naive. Colleges like HPY use alum interviewers to find out more about applicants, particularly things that can’t be determined from the rest of the application. One of the things that Harvard asks alum interviewer is whether the applicant is the type of person whom the interviewer would have wanted to have as a roommate. This is because an important part of the Harvard experience is what students learn by being around other Harvard students. There is nothing spiteful about reporting that a student lied in an interview. Indeed, reporting such info is one of the reasons that colleges like Harvard use alum interviewers.</p>
<p>I would not have wanted a roommate who was a liar. Nor would I have wanted a roommate who let snot drip down their face while talking to me (something that another student whom I interviewed did).</p>
<p>Harvard also asks interviewers to rate applicants’ characters among other things, and Harvard wants the interviewer to supply specific evidence – quotes and other details from interview – to support the rating. </p>
<p>For colleges that factor interviews into admission, an interview isn’t just a conversation. The applicant is being assessed on a variety of factors including on their general integrity.</p>
<p>On the plus side, alum interviewers also can put into context achievements that may seem minor to an admissions officer, but are big deals in other locations. For instance, one of the students whom I interviewed was a board member of our local library, and was on her own redesigning the library’s web page. This info wasn’t even on her resume, and I doubt that she had included it on her Harvard app.</p>
<p>The only reason that I found out about it during the interview was that coincidentally, I had interviewed her a couple of years earlier for a youth leadership program that I volunteered with and was still involved with. Through that program, I had heard that she was one of the few students from that program selected to be on the board of a local nonprofit. I learned this before I knew she was applying to Harvard or that I would be asked to interview her for Harvard.</p>
<p>So, out of curiosity, I asked her during the interview what she was doing on the board, and she told me. She didn’t think that what she was doing was a big deal, but I knew that it was a big deal because she literally was one of the first youths in our area to be appointed to a nonprofit board, and instead of just going to meetings and sitting there like a bump on a log, she had the commitment and sense of independence to create a project in which she used talents to help the organization.</p>
<p>She got into Harvard EA (back in the days when Harvard offered that option). </p>
<p>This is another good example of why colleges like Harvard use alum interviewers.</p>
<p>NSM, </p>
<p>Thank you for confirming that admissions at Harvard are arbitrary. If my nose drips, my life-long dream to attend Harvard is down the drain. Perfect. </p>
<p>I need to get back to class.</p>
<p>"
Thank you for confirming that admissions at Harvard are arbitrary. If my nose drips, my life-long dream to attend Harvard is down the drain. Perfect. "</p>
<p>Arbitrary? You’d like to go to college with someone who thinks it’s fine to engage in an hour-long conversation with snot dripping out of his nose? You’d like such a person as a roommate? In case I was not clear enough: The problem wasn’t that his nose was running. The problem was that he let the snot drip down his face during the entire interview: He never wiped or blew his nose.</p>
<p>One of the ways that Harvard asks alum to assess applicants is whether they’d have liked to have had the applicant as a roommate. I think that most alum interviewers would be open minded enough to see the benefit of having a roommate whose religion or political views are different. For instance, I have given strong recommendations, for instance, to a very politically conservative Republican student even though I’m a liberal Democrat. I disagreed with his political opinions, but his opinions were thoughtful and well researched. The student got in, too.</p>
<p>I doubt if many would have wanted a roommate who lacked basic social skills. Fortunately, Harvard’s interviewing policies mean that such students probably are rare at Harvard.</p>
<p>Is it correct to assume that the interview would be offered in response to the application being received by the school, without any inquiry on the part of the student? So, these interviews must take place in the first quarter for regular admissions. And, is it more unlikely to be interviewed for Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc. if one lives on the on the opposite coast?</p>
<p>Harvard does its best to arrange alum interviews for all applicants from the U.S. Interviews depend on whether there’s a willing alum who lives reasonably close to the applicant.</p>
<p>Thank you NSM. I’m thinking that the more interviews an applicant has, the more comfortable they would become. It probably makes sense then to take as many interviews as are offered.</p>
<p>Although I disagree with the poster who intends on submitting an untrue essay, I do agree that an interviewer should not base a recommendation of a student on subjective notions, such as whether or not the person would make a good roommate. One’s sense of what constitutes “social skills” is subjective. Behavior you find unacceptable may not bother me, and vice versa. For instance, I would never recommend against an applicant because of a runny nose. How does that reflect on his or her ability to succeed at Harvard? Concluding that a runny nose somehow indicates that a student is unworthy of an institution is extremely pretentious. The statement "Fortunately, Harvard’s interviewing policies mean that such students (who lack social skills) are rare at Harvard is offensive and is reminiscent of the days when only a white male from a privileged background could matriculate there. Indeed, the genesis of most racism in predominantly white nations was the idea that nonwhites were less desirable socially.</p>