<p>These are two eastern LAC’s that are scheduling one on one interviews with the representative that is responsible for our home geographic area. They are specifically identified as the “first reader” of the college apps for their respective schools. These were interviews, and we treated them as such.</p>
<p>One of the schools actually asked S to fill out an online resume in advance of the interview. </p>
<p>We prepared for the interviews. S read every piece of info we had on the two schools, and also reviewed their websites with an eye towards his prospective major. </p>
<p>I did not sit in on the interviews. However, I know what questions he had in advance, and he told me what he asked, and I am sure he was truthful and accurate. Simply responding by showing the website was not only not responsive, but not impressive either.</p>
<p>HOWEVER, we are still going to visit these schools in person, and I already told S that these admission folks will never be seen again after matriculation.</p>
<p>I was just plain old surprised at the behavior of the first rep. S has now done about 6 or 7 of these one-on-one interviews, most conducted at the schools themselves, and this was quite aberrant.</p>
<p>I think it’s fairly common for LAC’s to schedule interviews with admission reps. My son had several. My daughter ended up deciding that she preferred a larger, urban school – plus she was insistent on visiting the schools during fall of her senior year, so she arranged on-campus interviews at the schools that offered them. So I think these are genuine interviews – but interviews only play a limited role in admission decisions. </p>
<p>I guess in hindsight perhaps your son might have said something like, “oh, I’ve already visited the web site-- I know it has great information. But I was wondering if you could help me learn some things that aren’t on the web site.” I realize that’s putting the burden of good communication skills on a 17 year old — and of course the end result might have simply been that rep had no clue as to the answers to your son’s questions. </p>
<p>I’m with you here, but think “tell me a bit more about your program in X” is mighty open-ended for an admissions person to answer. It would count on the rep both knowing that dept well enough to answer in some detail and figuring out what your son really wanted to know. </p>
<p>I’d say, if he liked the school for solid reasons beforehand, reserve judgment until you visit and get a deeper feel for what the campus is like, how people interact, what you learn there. For all you know she wrote some sweet notes about him and his deep interest. </p>
<p>But you also seem concerned about the impact on the first read. My opinion: if the rookie rep is a new grad, she hasn’t been on the job long and will be on a steep learning curve for the next two months. This may have been one of her very first road trips and/or interviews. For the situation I know, rookies get mentoring through their first first-reads. If your son is qualified for the school, good chance he will get past that. And as second and third reads happen, more experienced folks will be putting in their two cents. Best wishes.</p>
<p>I do alumni interviews and if I don’t know answers to something then I investigate and email the student the answers or i refer them to the admissions counselor. </p>
<p>I hope you realize that the reps who get travel duties and are charged with meeting potential candidates are the most junior adcoms. Take a dive in Steinberg and Rachel Toor books. It will give you the right perspective. </p>
<p>And perhaps help you consider to ignore this entirely useless part of the application process. Unless there is a DEEP connection to a school, you are wasting time and opportunities. </p>
<p>Xiggi, your response is puzzling, at least to me.</p>
<p>Both schools “strongly recommend” a personal interview, and identify the interview as one of their factors for admission consideration. The schools send out the Rep who is responsible for our region, and offer interviews.</p>
<p>And we are wasting our time in “this entirely useless part of the application process”?</p>
<p>Hmm, do you think that ALL interviews are a complete waste of time, then? </p>
<p>Let me clarify my position and opinion on the interviews:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Unless the interview is deemed MANDATORY, it is best to avoid it altogether. </p></li>
<li><p>If the interview is mandatory, try to arrange it on campus with a senior admission officer. If that is not possible, keep the alumni interview as simple as possible. Volunteer little information beyond the application folder (which the interviewer has NO access to) and use the interview to be “sold” on the school.</p></li>
<li><p>The interviews as usually described in this forum play LITTLE to no role in the admission process. And that is extremely generous. Based on multiple reports on CC by what interviewers perceive to be their role, I think that the only role they might play is a negative one. Nobody needs to have someone trying to “catch a fibber” or googling you to death. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>I understand that the policies might be different for smallish NE LACs and especially for applicants that are close enough to be expected to have an interviews – like in the good old days. </p>
<p>However, consider your own experience in terms of dealing with the first school. It is NOT that unusual for alumni interviews. Again, that is why I am not positive about the process. Further I do NOT think that there is much to gain from trying to get a leg up or micromanage and hope to influence the process. </p>
<p>Lastly, as a small reference, in the past decade the most selective school in the country has reviewed 300,000 applications and done so with just a couple of … hundreds interviews for the total decade. </p>
<p>The same school has a very active alumni organization in my neck of the woods in Texas. The alumni organize recruiting and interviewing of local students. In the past decade, about 30 students were accepted and 20 have attended. What was the impact of the alumni interviewing? NONE --yes none-- of the successful applicants interviewed. And NONE, yes none, who interviewed were accepted. </p>
<p>Oh, don’t play with your shot at an admit. Not unless you really don’t care. This and the app are not the places to play around with chances, test adcoms. If a school is willing to interview, don’t assume it’s meaningless. Can you imagine the impact when an interviewer says, “kid declined?”</p>
<p>* what interviewers perceive to be their role* is NOT necessarily what adcoms do with the report. Even when the school I know best was saying in the CDS that interviews didn’t matter much, I knew better. They are eyes and ears on the kid, a first hand look. Even alums.</p>
<p>And they are not generally negative. If anything, there is a human inclination to find the good. And in keeping the process fair, a desire to find the good points is also part of the in-house process.</p>
<p>Off the top of my head the only schools I can think of that strongly recommend (meaning basically require) an interview are MIT, Georgetown and I think Carnegie Mellon likes applicants to have one. Princeton also has alumni interview most of the applicants but not sure what impact it actually has on admissions. I am sure there are others that I am unaware of. That would be a good list to pull together at some point for posting on CC for future applicants.</p>
<p>@ColdinMinny – interviews can play an important part in admissions and may also have an impact on consideration for merit scholarships. They usually aren’t evaluative in the sense of a job interview – that is, the interviewer doesn’t make the admissions decision, nor is the decision based primarily on the interview – but the interviewer will submit a report and it may certainly impact the decision.</p>
<p>Most of the time it probably doesn’t, simply because most young people probably don’t make much of an impression one way or another on the interviewer. So there’s probably not much to write about. But that’s true of essays as well–probably 90 percent of essays that college admissions readers see wouldn’t be remembered the next day – but the ones that are memorable get kids accepted. </p>
<p>But definitely if the school is sending its reps around for interviews, it’s an important part of the process. Unlike alumni interviews, when the student is meeting with an admissions rep it very well could be a person with a key role in the admissions process, and it may help with the admissions decision simply because the rep can match a real person to the submitted paperwork. </p>
<p>Well, that is a matter of perspective, especially finding the “good!” Perhaps that is the case with that school in RI, but it is hardly universal. And the “good” is hardly what transpired for the ilk of alumni interviewers a la Northstarmom, who went on and on about how she caught the Harvard applicants’ little fibs by googling their ECs.</p>
<p>The value of interviews is directly related to the person who will conduct the interview. In this thread, we seem to conflate all kinds of people within the “interviewever” range. The largest number of examples on CC have been with alumni interviewers and not with adcoms. Again, the former has zero to very little importance. The latter MIGHT in certain circumstances. A good yardstick? Start the interview by asking the person on the other side if he or she has seen your application (in after application interviews) and in the case the answer is no … you know what the value of the “report” will be. </p>
<p>For the record, once has to wonder about how recent some of the experiences shared here. It seems that some are dating 1 to 4 decades ago. In an age when applications appeared to be very different from today’s mostly electronic and distant applications. My experience is all within the past 12 years … and I think that might explain the divergent viewpoints. Just as there USED to be a time when the nice guidance counselor at your HS had much to say and would call the adcoms with her “recs” and discuss outcomes, there used to be a time when schools were getting a few hundreds, perhaps a few thousands, applications. Schools that get 10,000 to 40,000 applications have much larger fish to fry than dealing with alumni reports or tracking who talked to an adcom during a regional visit. </p>
<p>If you believe that much can be gained by interviewing or having a lot of contacts with adcoms, by all means … go for it. But if you can’t or wont, you will not have lost a darn thing! </p>
<p>Actually Xiggi…not always the junior most adcom. My DD had her regional interview with the director of enrollment management at her college. He was in our area and contacted her to talk. This was just after she submitted her EA application. Unfortunately, DD was out of town the day he was in our area…but he was very accommodating…and they arranged a telephone conversation. </p>
<p>He was terrific. </p>
<p>After, DD sent him a thank you for taking the time to schedule a telephone conversation. He wrote back a very nice not, and clearly said he was advocating for her acceptance.</p>
<p>So…sometimes more senior folks in the school do these regional interviews. </p>
<p>I do think Xiggi may have a point, in that there is certainly a chance to “blow” the interview, and give an unfavorable impression. On the other hand, since we are seeking not only admission, but, hopefully, merit aid, I simply felt it was not an opportunity to forego. Everything I read stresses demonstrating interest, especially at the smaller LAC’s. Well, if we get an email inviting S to interview close to home, with the regional College Rep, I simply feel it was prudent to take that opportunity.</p>
<p>Circling back to my original point, I was just flummoxed over the first College Rep.</p>
<p>It’s very common for colleges to assign each admissions staff member to a geographic region, and for those regional reps to be the ones to visit different areas and arrange for local interviews while they are visiting. There is a lot of discussion of that practice in the book, The Gatekeeper – in that case, the west coast rep for Wesleyan was describing visits to a a private prep school in Los Angeles.</p>
<p>Regarding the visits by a school such as Wesleyan to a school such as Harvard-Westlake, isn’t there quite a difference between college nights and discussions with potential applicants and … what is considered an individual interview? </p>
<p>As I wrote in my first post in this thread, it is instructive to locate the books by Jacques Steinberg (the writer that described the ordeal of Becca, the marijuana-cookie applicant from LA and detailed Figueroa’s close friendship with Sharon Merrow, the guidance counselor at Harvard-Westlake,) or Rachel Toor (who wrote her indictment piece about Duke’s adcoms) and, perhaps the best in the genre by Chuck Hughes. </p>
<p>Fwiw, Figueroa’s journey dates from the mid-90s! </p>
<p>I had almost the exact same situation in terms of interviews as well. The first one was a relatively (imo) inexperienced senior and the other one a really engaged alumni interview where we talked for a good hour and a half! I talked about similar topics for both, but the second one and I clicked much more. The first one just seemed to be not as interested in his school despite other senior interviewers being very enthusiastic. So you gotta just take it as a grain of salt. It is only one small aspect of admissions and people understand that not everyone connects.</p>
<p>It affected my image of the first school slightly, but not enough to stop me from applying</p>
<p>Northstarmom!, who claimed there are points given for certain sorts of ECs in a hierarchy! And, how long ago, now? My experience is as current as yours- but we know our own roles and not each other’s. Ime, interview reports can add to the picture. From the limited 2+2 I can put together about your experience, the school is not as interview oriented. OP said her son was interviewed by a newbie rep who would also review him for first cut. I don’t think this was for (what I think is) your school. “Two selective LACs.”</p>
<p>And you didn’t say, don’t lose sleep over a legit obligation that precludes that interview. You referred to “this entirely useless part of the application process.” And, “best to avoid it altogether.” You don’t see that as a sweeping dismissal? I believe that when the stakes are high, you play by certain expectations. </p>
<p>For the record, D1 was interviewed by the Director of Admissions during this person’s visit to local high schools.</p>
<p>Northstarmom said she had one student who claimed involvement in a group that she personally was involved in. She checked and noted the student was lying. I think that’s totally fair game.</p>
<p>As for interviews being “totally useless” – it really really depends. I’m considered a “senior” person in my college’s alumni interviewing network and have responsibilities beyond the norm. I fully realize that people overestimate the value of an alum interview. And some interviewers overestimate the impact of their own write ups too. I advise my fellow alums that we only serve as an additional set of eyes and ears for the college – that as much as the student may impress us, we don’t know the how other 400 kids from our area look like. And we should statistically expect that any given interview season, every single person we meet will be rejected since our college is admitting around 7% of applicants.</p>
<p>But I also know this: although the interviews are randomly assigned, when late Feb and March roll around, our admissions rep nudges the local director to move certain files to the top – to increase the chance that they get a face-to-face… the reason? Because these kids’ files are actually on the fence and addit info from the field is going to be very welcomed in the committee discussion rooms. And in several discussions with the college AO, after the fact about kids that happened to be admitted whom I interviewed? The college AO could repeat back to me the positives I had written about that student.</p>
<p>The write ups – at least for SOME kids – are being read and conveyed in committee – at least for my school.</p>
<p>We focused on important information for our specific situation, the rest went in and out. But I had done huge amount of research that lasted for couple years prior to kid application. I presented the list to her and she liked it a lot, put it in her priority sequence. This list contained so much information that reps could not add much more except for the very current developments in their admission practices. It was such a success that D. has asked me to do the same for her Medical school application. I was surprized, but did it anyway. That was much much easier, not much research at all. It has also worked perfectly. But D. tends NOT to listen to anybody at all, not to her councelor in HS, not to her pre-med advisor in UG, not any reps. When she was in doubt, she would visit palce another time before making decision. </p>