<p>Hi Dan,
My child just received an interview offer, and we have the following question. Does Tufts look at the high school the student attends and then assign the interviewer rather than look at where the student actually lives?</p>
<p>Hi momof3sons. It looks like Dan’s been and gone and didn’t see your post. So I thought I’d take a stab at it. My guess is that your son/daughter was assigned an interviewer in an inconvenient location?</p>
<p>The interview committees are geographic, and students are assigned to a committee based on the location of their high school (it’s generally hard to have boarding school kids interview from home). But the committee chair has both the school and home address. It depends on the committee, but I think that most chairs do what they can to assign interviewers who are either near the high school OR near the home (except for those boarders, of course). </p>
<p>Some of the committees cover a very large geographic area, and the geographic distribution of the interviewers doesn’t always mesh very well with the geographic distribution of the applicants. We do the best we can, but there are plenty of mis-matches. And plenty of kids who would like interviews but don’t manage to have one.</p>
<p>If an applicant is unhappy with the location of the interview, there’s no reason why he/she couldn’t contact either the regional committee chair or the admissions office to see if there’s an alternate interviewer or whether even the committee assignment could be changed. </p>
<p>And if nothing works and your S/D doesn’t have an interview, it’s fine to talk on the phone or write a note saying what he or she had especially wanted to convey in the interview.</p>
<p>I know this statement doesn’t always help in the overly tense application process, but please remember that a great many students are admitted to Tufts without interviews. The interviews are a good way for some students to help bring their applications to life, but for most everyone, there is plenty of information in the transcript, test scores, recommendations, and essays.</p>
<p>Thanks for the reply, Seashore. My son is not at a boarding school, but goes to a high school which is in a different county than the one we live in. (Not unusual for this high school.) He was assigned an interviewer in neither of those two counties, but rather in a third county. This is a major metro area, so there must be an interview committee in our “home” territory. He is going to get permission to skip an athletic practice (he’s the team captain) and will travel to the interview. He was reluctant to try to change the interview because of the highly competitive nature of the process-he didn’t want to seem like he wouldn’t go out of his way to do this. I appreciate your response. It makes sense, and I guess the area committee in this case just looked at his school and assumed where he must live.</p>
<p>My daughter, admitted for ED1 (at Tufts) a month ago, elected not to have an interview. She was/is a very strong candidate, and we know of scenarios where the interviews did not go well (not speaking about Tufts, here, specifically), and so she felt that because she couldn’t be assured of a successful interview (that the interviewer and she would connect, find something to talk about, etc.), she did not want to chance something negative impacting a pretty impeccable application. Kind of ironic since her very congenial (excellent student and wonderful person) best friend just had an interview with a Rice alum, and the best friend said that the interviewer could not have been more lacking in social affect, interest, and warmth. The two just sort of looked at each other. I do not think that one inept interviewer will impact this girl’s application, but the best friend would have lost nothing not interviewing.</p>