<p>driftingquill: sorry you got a weird interviewer ...</p>
<p>about the thank you note ... when did you have the interview? you're sure it's too late to send a thank-you note? Either way, I don't think not writing a thank you note is going to "seal your doom" ... take a deep breath! These sorta things are why interviews are not mandatory. :) I'm sure Brandeis will take things like this into account ....</p>
<p>As long as you didn't pull a gun out on your interviewer, the interview can't hurt you. ;)</p>
<p>anyway, thanks for the heads up on the "tell me a little about yourself" question. yuckies</p>
<p>hi all , had my brandeis interview 3 weeks ago in atlanta GA ... a real turnoff.. the guy was at brandeis in the 60's who loved brandeis caused they use to all protest vietnam together and the faculty didnt put grades to help him avoid the draft... i more or less heard 1 hour's worth of bush bashing and very little about brandeis ... a real nut... im not so politically inclined in either direction put whoa this guy was left... fell off the cliff left... and was definitely high when i met him... if brandeis is full of such people this school aint for me... brandeis should do a better job of selecting their interviewers.. but im still seriously considering brandeis for its academic merits...</p>
<p>Frankly, if you're turned off by liberals, Brandeis is not the school for you. Brandeis is well-known as an institution that supports social equality and liberal causes.</p>
<p>However, this interviewer seemed totally unprofessional. I would tell the Brandeis Admissions Office and demand a new interview.</p>
<p>im not turned off by liberals but there is liberal and off the wall liberal and that guy was the second type ... but dont get me wrong the interview went really well .. just it left me with a worst impression of brandeis than before the interview..</p>
<p>i think in general colleges dont really have a choice as not many alumni are willing to waste time doing interviews... unless they adored their college ...</p>
<p>I see his point though- I'm pretty liberal myself, but I don't want to be preached to for an hour while I'm supposed to be telling the guy stuff so he can write me a good report. That said, my interviewer was amazing, and it was just a great conversation. It was the first interview in which I actually enjoyed myself and had fun- and it was 2.5 hours long.</p>
<p>to finish the story, besides the wierd interview today i got an email from brandeis saying they are missing my mid year... yet i have in front of me the fedex receipt for it signed by a guy at brandeis ... i am desperately looking for the good sides of brandeis but they seem to only want to show me the lousy side... oh well...</p>
<p>I had a really weird interviewer, by far the worst i've been to. In one of the first questions, I said something about the classes I like depended, in part, on the quality of the teachers. Then he started this fifteen minute long abstract debate about how one should take responsibility for obtaining knowledge and i remember he said "i believe that we are responsible for everything that happens to us because we put ourselves in every situation" or something like that. When we finally got around to talking about Brandeis, it didn't seem like he had any particular affection for the school. He brought up politics and then criticized my view, and he mentioned something about becoming an "isolationist"--he kind of lost me at that point but I recall the words "a lot of rejection" "shutting down" etc. I don't think he liked me at all, he did tell me not to be undecided because one could just pick a major and then add on more, and he was telling me how people told him that his double majoring and minoring was an accomplishment but he felt he could have gotten a third major. All in all, not the best forty-five minutes I've spent.</p>
<p>Okay, wow, this is really long. Guess I needed to get a few things out of my system! Apologies for the venting :)</p>
<p>Don't worry too much about interviews with alumni -- at almost all schools, they don't count for anything! They're to make the alum feel "involved" with the school, so they'll keep giving $. </p>
<p>Neither my S nor my D had interviews with Brandeis alum -- and they both were accepted with merit scholarships.</p>
<p>I had my Brandeis interview today and I thought it went fantastically.
My interviewer was a senior at Brandeis, and conducted a decent interview. I think he was more nervous than I was... but we had some good conversations about being language freaks and we ended up talking about Swedish homesteaders in the Midwest, the reason they came, and what Sweden's role in the world has been like. TOTALLY random, but geography is something I'm really passionate about so it worked out.
I got a couple semi-tough questions at Brandeis:
"If Brandeis were to shut down completely for a year and we were to give you $3 billion, what would you do?"
I said something along the lines of me working in a hospital in Spain/Israel/Latin America and doing research on mental illnesses (especially bipolar) as well as taking tons of language classes/buying lots of Rosetta Stone classes. And, of course, I said I would donate to the hospitals at which I worked.
2nd question:
"If the interview were to end now and this was the last thing you could say, what extracurricular involvement would you tell me about?"
I told him about my experiences working at a medical office for the past 2 years.
The only negative thing I got from the interview was that the interviewer himself didn't seem to be an intellectual heavyweight. He asked me "Do you have any questions?" about 5 times... and I asked him tons of questions, but he never gave me particularly insightful responses.</p>
<p>I'm hoping to get a really good merit scholarship at Brandeis... will this interview help at all?
(Brandeis is one of my safeties)</p>
<p>I think the interview can help you if it showed you to be a particularly interesting and well-rounded person. many students have very high gpas and sats so it's the personal qualities that really put one over the top. if you are concerned that the adcom will think you are just applying to 'deis as a safety then you should explicitly state why you think Brandeis is the best match for you (ie "only at Brandeis can underclassmen have such meaningful relationships with top notch faculty members."</p>