My EC interview seemed cold and distant from the start. There was no “chemistry”, the lady just asked formal questions.
It felt to me not like a conversation, more like a questionnaire or interrogation. After some time of this I also became tongue-tied, though I’m normally pretty outgoing. The interview only lasted 25 minutes. I walked out of there feeling pretty discouraged. The following day I emailed a thank-you and never got a reply.
For me, this wasn’t my first college interview. A week before, I had one that was conversational and informal, lasted twice as long as it was supposed to, and felt great - I guess that is what I had to compare to.
My other impression: my interviewer seemed fairly young / new at EC.
Just doing the math, [interrogation style + short interview + no reply to thank you] = I fully expect a bad review from the EC.
Any advice? What (if anything) can I do at this point to undo the damage?
I’ve actually heard of a lot of experiences like that, some of which ended up in acceptances. Don’t worry too much ^^ I don’t think there is much you could do about it at this point. Sending a thank-you was a good idea. If your interviewer seemed distant from the start, perhaps she was just unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the process.
It is always a challenge. I am a regional chair of the MIT Educational Council (the alumni interviewers) and in order to serve our region, we need to recruit some 10 new interviewers each year. We do actually provide a reasonable amount of training (I ran 3 EC training sessions this week), but there are some EC’s who struggle a bit, particularly at the beginning. That being said, MIT knows the interviewers as well as the interviewees, and knows how to interpret a given interview report. 25 minutes is definitely on the short side, though long interviews are not necessarily good, nor are short bad. My longest ever interview occurred when I spent far too long hunting eventually fruitlessly for absolutely any topic that one of my applicants actually cared about.