<p>Earlier this (school) year I wrote a post regarding college interviews and what I wish I had known when I was interviewing for colleges. You can find this post at the link below and I would recommend reading it if you haven't already as I do make some references to it.</p>
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/973360-interview-tips-college-interviewer.html%5B/code%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/973360-interview-tips-college-interviewer.html
</a></p>
<p>A brief recap of who I am:</p>
<p>I am finishing my application process to as medical school and as I finish up my college career, I decided to come back and help some of the prospective students along. Hopefully it will make your experience smoother with some advice I wish I had and some insight I have had working on the other side of the admissions office.</p>
<p>I am a senior student interviewer for a Top-25 (As ranked by US News which really isnt as meaningful as it sounds) research institution. I have at this point conducted close to 200 interviews (I dont really keep track, this is fun for me but its based on as estimate of interviews I do per week) and I have identified some of the more common threads that run in interviews of both strong candidates and weak candidates. I am in fact a volunteer and not Pro-Staff or the professional staff of the office. The only benefits I get out of doing this are knowing that Im helping shape my Universitys community and the occasional slice of pizza or cup of coffee!</p>
<p>I write this update today to focus on juniors who are now coming into the interview process. There are a few differences with interviewing juniors as opposed to seniors. The first gigantic difference is that maturity level. Last semester (Fall) we were interviewing candidates that were just one year younger than the freshmen I work with at the university (I am also a Head TA for a large lecture class so I do work with some of the younger students). Juniors, while only a year younger than the seniors, do not have the seasoned experience of the college admissions process and that makes a HUGE difference. Further, they have usually not researched their options as well and dont really know what they want yet so they may have difficulty answering questions about their goals which is often a topic discussed in depth during interviews. In the admissions office, we expect this, and have been told on numerous occasions to expect less from the juniors and to be more lenient in our reports. While this means that you have more room for error it should also be taken as an opportunity to shine. If you can impress us, you REALLY impress us!</p>
<p>1) First off, as I mentioned in the previous post, resumes are extremely helpful and even more so for juniors. Since you have not submitted an application yet, when I sit down to read over my interviews for the day, all I have for sure is your name and address. If I am lucky, I might also have your high school and every once in a while, someones information sheet has some intended major on it. Thats it! A resume saves me some time in the fact that I can quickly scan down it and find out what you are interested in and find some conversation topics. My job is to make everyone walk away from the interview feeling like they had a good interview, and its easier to do that when I can strike up a conversation without having to dig around a lot!</p>
<p>2) Juniors have less experiencing interviewing--for some, this may be the first interview of their lives! I get that, but do some research on common interview questions. Here are a few I use:</p>
<p>Tell me a little bit about yourself. This is a common one I use since as per item 1, I know NOTHING about you. This should be a well-rehearsed answer that is no more than a minute long, maybe two, that tells me a bit about your academic interests and extracurricular interests.</p>
<p>What do you think are your three top strengths? Be sure to have explanations ready!</p>
<p>What do you think are your three top weaknesses? Also have explanations ready that include how you work to overcome these.</p>
<p>Which EC activities are most important to you and why?</p>
<p>What are your favorite subjects in school?</p>
<p>With all of these questions, I may not explicitly ask why, but do a bit of explaining. One tip I learned from my extensive medical school interviewing is if you are not sure whether your answers are of a good length for the interviewer, ask him! Granted medical school interviews that take sometimes nearly 2 hours have a lot more nuances one needs to be aware of and a longer time to get a feel for the interviewer, but at the end of a response, if you are not sure, ask me, Does that answer your question? It gives me a chance to break in if you are rambling and Im starting to lose interest, or a chance to ask you more about a specific item you brought up.</p>
<p>3) Speaking of common interview questions, almost every interviewer will want to know why you are interested in that school. I have never had an interview where I have not asked this question. Once again, I know juniors do not know as much about colleges, but please do your homework before coming into the interview! Look at the website for an hour or two the night before, read the viewbook, talk to current students, SOMETHING PLEASE!</p>
<p>Good answers tell me what you are looking for in a University and how my institution aligns with those desires. Bad answers are ones that tell me our campus is pretty (I know, I walk on it every day), we have a high ranking (we know that, how does that affect you?), or that your Mom told you to apply (including the fact that your parents are alumnionce again, how does that affect you?).</p>
<p>4) Knowing what you want in a university is important. If you cant answer this question, then you cant tell me why you want to come here, and I wont be as impressed with you nor think that you are that interested. Remember (from the previous post) that we are trying to gauge your interest in our university and while it is much harder with juniors, give us something to chew on.</p>
<p>As posted previously: Most schools agree to some unwritten rules. One of these is that we do not ask you to rate your interest level or rank schools in which you are interested. On our report, however, we are asked to gauge your interest level in our school. [ ]All the interviewers agree this is the hardest question to address on the interview report for a lot of prospective students. </p>
<p>I find myself writing down a lot for juniors that the student did not seem all that interested or that I really could not gauge an interest level. Once again, we take into account that you interviewed in the spring of your junior year, but if you can give us some sort of information in this regard, it will really stand out.</p>
<p>5) Please dont bring all of your certificates! We trust you to write down what is true on your application. If something seems fishy, its obvious and we know it. We dont need proof of everything you did! As Murphy would have it, those students the bring in certificates also bring in certificates that are not of a standard letter size or are too thick to put into the document feeder so then I have to spend twenty minutes of my life (or twenty minutes of one of the office secretaries life) manually scanning in every single document that you brought even though probably no one will take more than a cursory glance at it. I came in after an interview with a stack of papers in all sorts of shapes and sizes that stood a centimeter and a half high and my colleague just came up to me and said, Oh my! I am so, so sorry for you right now!</p>
<p>6) The interview is designed for us to get to know you as a personthere will be plenty of time later for the committee to look at your credentials. As such, talk about school to the degree that you want to talk about school, but I dont need a rundown of your academic history unless you want to talk about it. You dont need to explain a bad grade or two to me; you can explain that in writing later if you are so compelled, but unless its important in a story of how you overcame or adapted, I really dont care. Im trying to figure out if you would make a good friend here at the University.</p>
<p>On that note, I dont need your transcriptalthough I know some interviewers who would disagree with me and like to page through some classes. I would say this: A listing of GPA/SAT/ACT might be useful. To be quite honest, even though I did not have a perfect score, a perfect score on the SAT/ACT just doesnt impress me that muchthere are a whole lot of them now. Even rankings of top 10% dont mean that much anymore since a huge percentage of our first year class is in the top 10% of their high school class. It tells me that you have the ability to do well, and not much more.</p>
<p>The take home message for this point is: If I were you, I would probably have my one page resume with GPA/SAT/Rank on it, and maybe a separate one page sheet listing my classes and maybe AP scores or something. Two pages to scan in is nothing, and that should cover your bases. Dont be too offended if your interviewer does not spend time talking much about your classes, the admissions committee will go over all of that stuff in detail later.</p>
<p>7) Revisiting the topic of helicopter moms! Its time to be independent! Remember to tell your parents to give you some space so we can chat without them trying to follow us! Once the interview is over, Id be more than glad to talk to them and answer questions for them, but today, the focus is on you!</p>
<p>8) Be sure to have intelligent questions to ask me. This is a conversation! I want to know how you are as a person and a good interview will flow with me asking you questions and you asking me questions back! At the end, I will usually ask you for any final questions so please dont be caught with nothing to ask! There is no way you could possibly know everything there is to know and not having questions just makes you seem uninformed to the point of not knowing what to ask!</p>
<p>9) If I ask you a question again, or ask for more details, this is a good thing! It means I like you and Im giving you a chance to give me more information that I think would be helpful or to correct some information from your first answer! I could just move on, but I want to be able to write the best things about you so take this opportunity to give me more information rather than just repeating what you said!</p>
<p>10) Finally, on the topic of thank you notes, since it is such an important topic, I will reiterate what I said in my first post about these. SEND ONE! For the parents that are reading this: why are you not on your kids to send one after every interview!?!?! My mother hounded me every 30 minutes until I wrote one to make sure I didnt forget! This is a good way to stand out and it shows appreciation for the efforts of your interviewer who is most likely a volunteer like me. To this day, the students that stand out most are the ones that did write a note afterward saying thank youremember, I am evaluating whether you would be a good fit in the community and we like people who show their appreciation! Even with the seniors I receive usually fewer than 10% of my interviewees sending me a thank you so it stands out when you do. For some reason which I am not party to, juniors send even fewer thank you notes (I can count on one hand how many I have received so far this semester). It makes you memorable when someone mentions something about me to you later, and if its a physical card, I might keep it on my desk and inquire about your status later if I really did like you (always a good thing to have someone in the office going to bat for you). In any case, its a habit that will serve you well for the rest of your life and a good one to get into now.</p>
<p>To answer the question of email vs. snail mail (direct copy from previous post):</p>
<p>Snail Mail is going to be a better option, but be sure you have your card/letter out the same day and you mail it from campus. That way it gets to me a lot quicker. For my medical school interviews, I carry a pack of thank you cards with me and a booklet of stamps and I am sure to write down the names of people who interviewed me. Before I leave, often in the cafeteria or somewhere else I can sit down, I write my cards and then drop them in the closest mailbox. If you are unsure where to send the mail, address it to the interviewer c/o the admissions office.</p>
<p>The reason I say snail mail is better: 1) it is more memorable in today's world of email. 2) I may forget to forward a copy of your email to the admissions office to put in your file and then it is as if there was no thank you sent at all. With snail mail, a copy is placed in your file before I even get it. If it is sent directly to me (you looked up my campus box number online for example) I have a physical note in my hand that I will remember to hand off to get scanned. 3) Please don't send gift cards or things of great monetary value. Some people have found cute ways of saying thank you, but most of us are volunteers who do this because we want to.</p>
<p>Now, there is also a reason to send an email out too, but it is NOT a substitute for snail mail IMO. Our office likes to have the reports done within a day for those of us who volunteer and are only in once a week. But for me, since I am in more times a week, I usually have a few days to do them. The email is a nice touch of there is something you want to say before the report is written, but otherwise the snail mail will be enough for me to remember you by!</p>
<p>Remember that most of these students are not being paid for this and do this because they want to so please show your appreciation for their hard work!</p>
<p>11) Finally, juniors make more interview mistakes than seniors, and we understand this but try not to make these!</p>
<p>Racist comments are inexcusable, even in joking form. Enough said.</p>
<p>You dont need your cell phone for the 20 minutes we will be talking. Even if it is turned off if you have it in your hand, it makes me feel like you are waiting for something more important than me to happen. Leave your cell phone in your bag or with a parent. Please do turn it off. We tend to interview in quiet places, even a vibrating phone is distracting.</p>
<p>Regarding dress, this is a casual interview (for most places) so as long as you dont show up in a ratty t-shirt and jeans you should be fine. For men, I would go with khakis and a polo or a casual collared button down shirt. I dont know much about womens fashion but the equivalent is fine. Most Ive seen wearing slacks or a skirt and a blouse or sweater. In the hotter months Ive seen a lot of colorful sundresses. No need to wear a standard black and white suit (this may be different for scholarship interview, I dont know but I would guess they are more formal).
If it helps, most students are coming from between classes or before or after classes so we will be wearing what we wear to class. We have some dress guidelines but they are few: look presentable and no logos of other schools. This means that I might show up in a school t-shirt and khaki cargo shorts. I try to avoid jeans but plenty of my fellow interviewers have no problems with wearing jeans that do not look sloppy.</p>
<p>Bulldozer moms are worse than helicopter moms. Helicopter moms just hover over you and want to manage every part of YOUR life. Bulldozer moms push US around and try to hound us with questions and tell us how to do OUR jobs. If you have a bulldozer mom who can get away with such during PTA meetings, please tell her to calm down for the visit day. There is nothing wrong with having a lot of questions and we will answer them all, but dont push us around. It gets exhausting!</p>
<p>Dont tell me everything you dont like about the school. Or worse yet, criticize the school and its policies. There may never be an institution that is 100% perfect for you, and that is okwe understand there will be nuances here and there that dont jive with everyone, but if that much truly bothers you, dont apply here. Youre wasting everyones time and energy.</p>
<p>All right! I think that is it for now! Please let me know if you have any questions! Good luck to all with your application process!</p>