<p>I read on this forum that Harvard received 35,000 applications this year. Here's the silly part...do all of those applicants get contacted for an interview?</p>
<p>Not all of them.</p>
<p>nah, don’t think any question is ever silly, unless it is ■■■■■■■■. lmao</p>
<p>of course not. it depends on availability in the region/ # of applicants from that state.</p>
<p>Not everyone gets interviewed, but they try their best. jsungoh is right. It depends on if there are any alumni in the area and the alumni to applicant ratio (if there are a thousand applicants and a handful of alumni in on area… not everyone will be interviewed). </p>
<p>Interviews done over Skype or over the phone are more common nowadays, though, so distance may not matter in some cases.</p>
<p>Do they decide who gets an interview? I imagine allot of those 35,000 are not viable candidates, just high school seniors throwing away $75…
</p>
<p>Um, no. It has to do only with availability (for 1st interviews, anyway).</p>
<p>Homer: there’s not time to pre-sort the applications. They bundle up the contact info of completed files and send them out to local coordinators. The local coordinators then divvy them up to the available alum interviewers.</p>
<p>However, if you get contacted for an interview around March, then that means that:
a) You are on the edge and they want to clarify/check something about you
b) You are in, and they want to talk to you to sell themselves a bit to you (while maintaining the premise of checking that you are OK)</p>
<p>All IMO, but with some experience to back it up, though there may be more reasons</p>
<p>There are second round interviews?</p>
<p>^Sometimes. I don’t know if there’s an established doctrine about why they happen. I got two interviews and I still don’t know why.</p>
<p>There are people who get second, but also (especially for ints) “late interviews”. The difference is that they come after your app has been read, so those are the only 2 reasons I could think for it…</p>