Interviews with older alumni

Applying to College
21

<p>Going back to the OP, "what kind of questions CAN you ask?", perhaps the alum is uniquely able to describe:
How has his degree held up within his profession; how is it regarded by the communities he's lived and worked in since college </p>

<pre><code> why s/he chooses to devote volunteer time this way when so many other uses are competing for the time (that's a softball question but will result in your hearing
</code></pre>

<p>the best things about the school)</p>

<p>How has the college changed over time (assume they read everything about the college in writing, at the very least); what hasn't changed (enduring values of the school) </p>

<p>Keep in mind that this person might also play a role in whether or not you are accepted to the college. </p>

<p>I note that my alma mater has, in some ways, a new culture around every l0 years, so unless someone is that close to it age-wise, I don't know that an alum who's been away 15 years is that much better than one who's been away 25 or 35 years. Besides, anything the alum can't answer due to age could be gleaned better by staying overnight with students on-campus.</p>

22

<p>EJR - You bring up a good point. I have not encouraged my son to do alum interviews, as I think they have the potential to do more harm than good if they're evaluative. I worry that a 26 year old or 62 year old doesn't have a lot of experience with adolescents and if they only do a few interviews a year, their input may not be valid. </p>

<p>My friend's son was interviewed by a truly crazy woman. She drove her son to this woman's remote location. The woman lived in a mess of an apartment. It was cold and there was no place nearby for my friend to go, so the woman invited her to stay for the interview, but asked that she sit in the powder room on the toilet with the door closed. In retrospect, she realizes they should have left right then. Her son did not get into this school, even though he had stellar grades, EC's, SAT's AND a very active, LEGACY father.</p>

23

<p>yeesh, premiegray, WHAT a story (post above)! Perhaps the colleges need to start a selective admissions process for their alumni reps! A bad one can really damage a school's rep. Thanks for not printing the name of the college above.</p>

24

<p>Not only can a bad one damage aq school's rep. it can damage the kid's chances of getting in, especially now that schools are splitting haris over the top candidates.</p>

25

<p>I had an interview with an alumni from the class of '75. I think it went really well. He explained in detail what it was like to go to that school when he attended, but he had not visited since he moved out 31 years ago. So, he wasn't entirely sure how it had changed.</p>

<p>He did answer most of my questions in great detail. The only ones he couldn't answer were ones about my prospective major, neuorscience, because he was a history major. That didn't really bother me because most of my interviewers were humanities majors.</p>

26

<p>"When I was 18, I thought my father was pretty dumb. After a while, when I got to be 21, I was amazed to find out how much he'd learned in three years!"</p>

<p>Father O'Malley, Going My way</p>

<p>Old timers can teach us a great deal, if we give them the chance. I remember the conversations I had with my grandfather (may he RIP). He definitely had interesting lessons to share. Unfortunately, I only understood his words after he was gone.</p>

<p>Most alums visit their alama matter from time to time. I have visited mine annually since I graduated in 1996. Of course, not all alums will visit annually, but most visit ever 3 or 4 years. I agree that a university must carefully chose its interviewers. An alum that has not been to her/his alma matter in over a decade probably won't be in touch with modern realities.</p>

27

<p>my UPenn interviewer was in his 60s and had obviously never conducted an interview of any kind before. He asked canned questions, frequently consulted a notebook, asked me to repeat things multiple times, and had little to say about campus life.
A week later, he e-mailed me saying that he had forgotten to ask some things. I replied that he could call, schedule another meeting, or just ask me the questions via e-mail. I heard nothing for another 2 weeks, and then he called, asked the SAME questions over again, and was overall very difficult to deal with.</p>

<p>Conversely, my Rice interviewer was a friendly, intelligent 26 year old nuclear engineer who told me everything I could possibly have wanted to know about life at the university.</p>

<p>Big difference.</p>

28

<p>"I agree that a university must carefully chose its interviewers. An alum that has not been to her/his alma matter in over a decade probably won't be in touch with modern realities."</p>

<p>That would be great, but the universities have to depend on volunteers to do alum interviewers, something that I hope that the students who are applying now will remember when they graduate. From what I've seen, the older alum often are more willing to interview than are younger alum. The universities don't get to pick and choose, but use whoever is nice enough to volunteer.</p>

29

<p>I would like to address a comment about a bad interview affecting admission. I have been doing alumni interviews for an Ivy for over 25 years. They do not use the interview to evaluate candidates, it is to give the candidate an opportunity to learn about the school. I get to the campus regularly and in fact, a few weeks ago was a panelist there to address students on careers.I am more informed now about what is happening on campus than I was right after I graduated when I lived 500 miles away for four years and could not get back to campus.</p>

30

<p>Absolutely Northstarmom. Interviews are informal, in most cases have absolutely no impact on the outcome of the application and are completely optional and voluntary. Applicants should remember that. I always remind the applicants that I am interviewing that they should be relaxed and ask as many questions as possible because the interview is primarily for their benefit. Hopefully, the applicant will walk away from the interview feeling like they learned something useful and valuable about the school. But in some instances, that doesn't happen and if that's the case, they should not lose interest in the school or hold it against the school.</p>

31

<p>I agree with what's been said here about the value of the information you'd get in this situation depending greatly on the alum. Some remain very involved and in tune to campus and campus life, and luckily those tend to be the ones participating in these types of intereviews. </p>

<p>One thing that's pretty consistent is that alum tend to have their pulse on how the current reputation of the university impacts them in professional environments.</p>

32

<p>I just had an interview with an alumnus from the class of '62, and frankly, it was much better, and indeed more informative when compared to my interviews with younger alumni. While this is only a personal experience, I do believe that older alumni do have a view of college affairs and indeed of the world that would be very useful to college applicants.</p>

33

<p>" I have been doing alumni interviews for an Ivy for over 25 years. They do not use the interview to evaluate candidates, it is to give the candidate an opportunity to learn about the school."</p>

<p>I believe that this is true for the majority of colleges, which select students based on stats. Even ECs have little or no weight in admissions for most colleges. If you want to know how much weight ECs and interviews carry, check the info in the colleges' common data set (links to mahy are pinned to the top of one of the first two boards on CC) or pay the $15 to the US News Premium On-line college edition to access until Aug. the info for all colleges.</p>

<p>When it comes to my alma mater, Harvard interviews definitely do count, and Harvard tries to interview all U.S. applicants. (If it's not possible to interview an applicant due to the lack of convenient alum interviews, however, that doesn't count against the student.)</p>

<p>The interviews are evaluative, and the alums have to write a narrative as well as rate students on certain characteristics. I imagine that there are relatively few circumstances in which an outstanding interview can tip an applicant in. An example might be if a first gen college student from a school in which the GCs and teachers don't know how to write recommendations, and the student didn't understand what to put in the application (for instance, I have volunteered in low income schools in which students honestly thought that they should be modest in applications and not provide examples of their leadership and other abilities) provided very important information in the interview that was not provided in the application. </p>

<p>I definitely know, however, that bad interviews will hurt you, and I know that the admissions officers do read the interview reports. I have had calls and e-mails from admission officers with follow-up questions. I also noticed that a couple of students whom I caught in lies in interviews did not get in even though one got into a top ranked college that did not do interviews. </p>

<p>The type of lies that I caught students in? One claimed extensive experience with a city EC that I happened to volunteer with and my S was a top officer in. I was very familiar with the organization. There was no way that what the student said about their participation was true.</p>

<p>Another student claimed that their favorite book was an obscure book that just happened to be a book that I deeply loved and was extremely familiar with. When I asked the student about why they liked the book, the answer was vague and also made no sense, which indicated that the student had never read the book, but was citing the book to try to give a false impression of themselves.</p>

<p>Another student claimed that they were the first person in their family to go to college. Later in the interview, they said that they had gotten interested in a subject after reading their father's college textbook. When I asked about the discrepancy between that and their claim that no one in their family had gone to college, the student said that they'd forgotten that their father is a college grad.</p>

34

<p>Ejr1, I interview for my alma matter and they clearly asked me not to evaluate the candidate. The point of the interview is to have an informal discussion with applicants, answer their questions and write a brief report on the candidates overal presentation and communication style. It really isn't the interviewer's place to evaluate or recommend an applicant. I know I don't and if I should inadvertently do so, I hope the university would have the presence of mind to discount it.</p>

35

<p>aww u guys depress me. my interviewer loved me and said he would try his hardest in his report to get me in because he thought i belonged at that school, however i guess it wont help as much as i would like to think it would. :(</p>

36

<p>Alexandre wrote: "Interviews are informal, in most cases have absolutely no impact on the outcome of the application and are completely optional and voluntary. Applicants should remember that."</p>

<p>I don't know if this is exactly accurate. I have been interviewing at my alma mater, an Ivy, for about 10 years, and the information I receive every year from the Admissions Office as well as from my local committee, is that the interview most certainly DOES impact the outcome of the application, in some cases quite a lot, and it most certainly is NOT completely optional.</p>

<p>Granted, my sample size is ONE, so I can't make global statements about how important the interview is in general, but at least at my school they claim it is quite important.</p>

<p>-Greg</p>

37

<p>Oh, I just read NorthStarMom's reply. I basically agree with it 100%. </p>

<p>Then again, you may now know, if you read closely, what Ivy I went to... we both went to the same college....</p>

38

<p>I also have caught students in rather blatant lies. One student claimed he forgot to bring his SAT scores to the interview (though I asked him to.) He said he didn't remember the scores exactly, but the (SAT IIs) were something like 720, 740 and 760, but "all above 700". He also said he'd taken 4 AP exams and gotten like three 4s and a 5 on them. Well, after the interview, I called his guidance counselor, just to check so I could give accurate information on my report (not because I was suspicious), and she told me his scores on the SAT II were like 520, 550 and 600, and the AP exams were 2, 3, 3, and 4. I mentioned to her that the kid had told me somethiing different. I asked her if she was SURE what she told me was correct. She said it was. I didn't want to get the kid in trouble, so I told her that he probably just forgot. </p>

<p>However, he sure did forget in a very serious way, didn't he?</p>

<p>I did not mention this in my interview report, because I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, and because he did say he "THOUGHT he remembered them to be" 720 etc... he didn't say they WERE 720 etc. I realize it was most likely that he was just lying to me, but I always try to give the benefit of the doubt, students being nervous and all. If he had forged the SAT score report, or told me he was VERY CERTAIN they were a certain score, I would have mentioned it. However, this information did color my overall report a little, I am sure.</p>

<p>He didn't get accepted anyway. His grades in HS looked like a smorgasbord, which was really amazing. The kid had just about one of every letter grade, A, B, C, D, F. He had mostly As, very high As (like 99 and 100 average) and in the most difficult classes (AP Calculus and English and such-- well, they were IB, but same difference) but then had a few Cs, Ds and even two Fs in some of his peripheral classes like economics and first-year spanish and plain old introductory history. </p>

<p>Baffling. Really baffling. </p>

<p>Mostly I have seen fair consistancy. But this kid had it exactly backwards. He did spectacularly well in the seriously difficult classes, but then managed to fail the most elementary classes which required the least amount of work. </p>

<p>Very strange.</p>

39

<p>" I mentioned to her that the kid had told me somethiing different. I asked her if she was SURE what she told me was correct. She said it was. I didn't want to get the kid in trouble, so I told her that he probably just forgot. "</p>

<p>You're kinder than I am. I would have told the counselor.
I also would have included that info in my report. I simply don't believe that any student bright and ambitious enough to be applying to a college that apparently has alum do serious interviews (not interviews in which alum simply chat about the college) made a simple mistake in reporting the scores. </p>

<p>I wouldn't have said the student lied, but would have quoted the student about how the scores were "all above 700," and would have said what the GC said. If it ends up that the GC was that wrong, then there's a good chance that the GC's recommendation didn't accurately reflect the student. If the student was wrong, then the college probably would figure out that the student didn't hold truth in high value.</p>

<p>"Mostly I have seen fair consistancy. But this kid had it exactly backwards. He did spectacularly well in the seriously difficult classes, but then managed to fail the most elementary classes which required the least amount of work."</p>

<p>Hmm. I have kids who've done things like that. When they aren't challenged, they don't work. I also know someone who got an 800 v in English, but flunked AP English because the teacher was very simplistic with stupid assignments that included having kids circle words in word puzzles. The kid didn't go for the easy A, just mentally checked out.</p>

40

<p>I just re-read my report, and in the report I DID say what the student said to me verbatim, that he could not remember his SAT II scores exactly, but that the ones he remembered were correct to "within +/- 30 points." That was his exact quote. He told me he got a 720, 780 and 780. The GC told me they were actually in the high 500s and low 600s.</p>

<p>I did mention to the GC what the student told me, so she definitely knew. I didn't blast him, though. I just told her I found it odd. I let her make up her own mind as to what, if anything, to do about that.</p>

<p>My thought about my report to the AdCom was this: First of all, the GC may have screwed up. Second of all, even if she hadn't, the student may honestly have remembered things wrong. Third, even if he was actually LYING to me, the AdCom surely would notice this discrepancy between what he reported to me and his actual scores. </p>

<p>I decided, since I couldn't be 100% sure what the case was, my best course of action was to simply report what the student reported to me, and to trust that the AdCom could come to its own conclusions when they noticed the huge discrepancies between his actual scores and what he reported to me. </p>

<p>I mentioned several times in my report that "he reported to me" that his scores were such and such. </p>

<p>Unless things are absolutely blatant and unequivocal, I usually give students the benefit of the doubt, and present just facts that they present to me. I do report my feelings, of course, about their personalities and my feelings about how I think the interview went. </p>

<p>In this case, I erred on the side of caution, and just reported the facts I was 100% certain of---that is, what the student said to me out of his own mouth. I made no mention of speaking with the GC.</p>