<p>I’ve actually read quite a few reflections after interviews where people said that the interviewer provided more information than asked questions. Glad your son’s went well!!</p>
<p>@Cantiger…Let me ask you since you obviously have experience on this, is there a difference when interviewers give info as suppose to ask questions?</p>
<p>saona: interviewers are not monolithic nor even well trained. </p>
<p>The interview is a conversation. Some are chattier than others.</p>
<p>If you get a chatty one, he or she will talk more. If not, then not. </p>
<p>You’re straining to discern some sort of data point or some predictive correlation. There isn’t one to be had.</p>
<p>@T26E4- I saw in another thread that you are an interviewer. In the reports that you write about prospecrive students, what sort of things do you write about? Is there a specific format? Are you told if the students you interview get in?</p>
<p>I write the salient points of the conversation/interview and general impressions. Since each conversation goes different directions, there’s no pattern of what’s discussed and eventually reported.</p>
<p>No format – just a narrative. They ask us for a numerical rating but that’s ancillary to the narrative. Yes we are informed of the student’s eventual decision.</p>
<p>(I’m not a PTon interviewer, FYI)</p>
<p>Hey guys, i’m taking my interview on Tuesday with an alumni who graduated in '86. Any tips? What should I bring? What are some key questions he will definitely ask me?</p>
<p>Every interview is different. I didn’t bring anything to mine.</p>
<p>@T26E4 That’s odd, my interviewer specifically wrote in their email to me that they’re not allowed to buy me anything because it’s against the committee’s policies. Wonder what’s going on then…</p>
<p>@PrinceA You should bring your resume. I didn’t think to bring mine, and that turned out to be fine since my interviewer didn’t ask for it. But a friend of mine was asked for hers and fortunately had the foresight to bring it. Aside from that, you probably won’t need anything.</p>
<p>guts: I interview for another Ivy so if that’s what he/she said to you, then I accept it at face value. We have no restrictions whatsoever on simple items (drink, pastry) – even with NCAA recruited athletes if we are interviewing them in the normal course as an applicant (as opposed to interviewing them as part of recruiting).</p>
<p>To be frank, I think that prohibition is stupid – that I can’t buy you a coffee/tea/soft drink when we meet at Starbucks.</p>
<p>Can any Princeton interviewers chime in here?</p>
<p>I haven’t seen the guidelines for interviewing the class of 2018, but the Princeton guidelines for inteviewing candidates for the class of 2017 do not prohibit buying something to eat or drink for the candidate being interviewed. They do say that alcohol consumption should not take place during the interview, which goes without saying.</p>
<p>I just had my interview today, and I think it went pretty well! It was in a local coffee shop, and I wore very good jeans and a short-sleeved collared shirt (I saw on CC that others had worn full suits, etc. to their interviewers, but I thought that was a little OTT). The guy was really chill and we had a good conversation. I didn’t bring anything with me, and the interviewer implied that he didn’t want any anyway. I’d say that it was more informational than evaluative - I asked just as many questions as he asked me! One thing I would say is to really think about why you want to go to Princeton. I decided to do EA literally the weekend before it was due, so I didn’t do quite as much research as I could have. But other than that it was great! The guy even said I could email him if I had any more questions.</p>
<p>thanx boondocks. Perhaps guts’ scenario is an interviewer who is mis interpreting the stricter NCAA athlete recruiting guidelines and applying it to the normal PTon interviews? Or perhaps they’re just cheap? LOL</p>
<p>Just gonna say that my interviewer offered to buy me something. Even if there is a rule against it, maybe they just don’t care and they are just trying to be courteous to the interviewee. </p>
<p>Anyway, interview went great! He was very nice and it was just a normal conversation that was very informative about the school.</p>
<p>Just had my interview last night! He asked me to meet him in his office, so I just dressed business casual, with a shirt, slacks, and a tie. It went pretty well, but I must say he looked tired after a long day at work…he didn’t seem too energetic, and he didn’t ask me anything out of the normal, just the “tell me about yourself,” and “why Princeton.” I brought a resume, but he didn’t want to see it. The whole thing lasted about half an hour after I squeezed as much as I could from him on his experiences at Princeton…he didn’t seem too keen on trying to get to know me better etc. Also, he asked me if there was anything I should tell him about that’s not already in my application (thought this was something subjective, where he sees passion/enthusiasm in my voice and so on, but yea). </p>
<p>I felt I did the best I could to keep the conversation going…I mean, he seemed pretty interested in what activities I did, and he was very responsive to some of my unique experiences. And I guess I can’t blame him for being tired haha. From what I took away on his career, he’s a really interesting, very busy guy. In the end, he told me “you’ll be successful wherever you go,” and “Princeton is a really good fit for you.”</p>
<p>But yea, so far people have been posting about interviews that lasted 1-1.5 hours, but just remember that it all depends on your interviewer. I’m sure my interview was shorter because he was just a busy guy, and that’s all he had time for. </p>
<p>Hope this helped.</p>
<p>Yeah, trigonal, I had the same problem. I could only have a 45-minute long interview because my interviewer had to back to work and pick up his relatives from the airport.</p>
<p>T26E4, well I guess that’ll remain a mystery to me!
trigonal, it could be worse. A friend of mine who just had her interview said her interviewer took the opportunity to vent about his life to her and hardly asked her a thing…</p>
<p>I had my interview a couple weeks ago. We met in a library for about thirty minutes. It started out a little weird because he was dressed in jeans and an old rain jacket, so I was sitting on a bench for about ten minutes with him standing nearby before we realized we were supposed to be talking to each other. He’d probably graduated at least twenty years ago if not more…he was a bio-engineer and I’m a psych major, so I don’t think he understood anything I said when I told him why I want to study psych. It was kind of weird though. His first question was “why do you want to go to Princeton,” and I started out with the simpler reasons to get them out of the way before getting into the bigger stuff, but then he kind of interrupted me halfway through to ask me a completely different question. The same thing happened when he asked why I want to study psych. I mentioned that I’d just moved to Portland from Orange County, and he asked me what I thought about the northwest. And what is the one thing I’d change about it if I could. Then he stopped asking me questions about twenty minutes in, so I tried to ask him as many questions as I could, and then I just let it die out because we were getting nowhere. So yeah…it was fine I guess. I just didn’t get to say everything I wanted to say, and I really love everything about this school and my major, so that made me kind of sad.</p>
<p>As far as attire, I had just come from church, so I wore a somewhat nice dress.</p>
<p>In hopes of making others feel better about how their interviews went, I will share mine (I’m not going to go into a tremendous amount of detail, though):</p>
<p>It started out okay. The guy I had was nice and he sort of strayed from the typical interview questions, but nothing too out there. Five minutes in, he started lounging (we were in a public place, btw) and he pulled out his phone. I am not really sure if he was paying attention to anything I was saying or not (because he kept checking his phone frequently), but I didn’t want to be a jerk and tell him to put his phone away. Things took a turn for the worse when he said that he doesn’t think that Princeton is right for me and he even started to suggest other schools I should apply to (for all I know, he could be right, but is he not supposed to be selling the school to me?). Then he proceeded to tell me about his life for the next 30 minutes or so. The whole thing lasted an hour. It was just really odd. Not really what I expected from a Princeton alum, that is for sure.</p>
<p>Mine was a couple weeks ago; I got a former Private Equity manager (and a Wharton MBA) who is now in Health Care. We met in Starbucks. He opened with a couple basic questions and then started asking me about what I do, both academically and extracurricularly. After that, he asked me why, precisely, I had picked Princeton as my top choice. Simple enough. All in all, it took about an hour and 15.</p>
<p>@latin: I wouldn’t worry about it, since the interviews aren’t that important. Your interviewer sounds a little bit odd…</p>