<p>I'm...going on an interview at HMC in less than a month! I've never done this before...the admissions officer said it's informal and lasts half an hour. What...do I do? What should I expect? How should I prepare?</p>
<p>Any info would be much appreciated. =)</p>
<p>Think of questions that you would like to ask. Even if he doesn’t ask you them it is good to have them at hand. Most interviews end with your interviewer asking you a question. I think that it is important to have something to ask.</p>
<p>be prepared to talk about what you do at your high school and what about mudd appeals to you. stuff like that</p>
<p>You could Google for lists of common interview questions and think about how you would respond to them, though interviews do sometimes go off in predictable directions. Just try to go in confident and relaxed.</p>
<p>And I agree with cnaut – asking a few thoughtful, non-trivial questions shows that you’re interested and took some time to prepare.</p>
<p>“why hmc?”
“what do you think you’ll get from hmc?”
“what will you bring to hmc?”
“what are your strengths?”
“what are your weaknesses?”
“what is the integral of 1/ln(x) ?”</p>
<p>jk on the last one though… :D</p>
<p>I got the whole what do you do outside of school and why HMC deal. I spent some time on the plane ride over compiling my thoughts into a notebook, helped me out a lot. I guessed every question that came (there weren’t many).</p>
<p>making an extracurriculars/honors resume can help organize your thoughts and sometimes gives an interviewer a place to start (or he/she can just scribble notes on it or ignore it completely…)</p>
<p>Thanks! I’m still really nervous, but more like an excited nervous! I’m used to interviewing teachers/students for my school paper, but I’ve never been interviewed myself! (This may help me in guessing which questions I’m asked, though!) And making a resume sounds like a really good idea.</p>
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<p>li(x)? Haha I wish we could just talk about math for half an hour instead. :p</p>
<p>well, li(x) = int(1/ln(x)) is a trivial answer… it basically is like saying:</p>
<p>4 - 2 = 4 -2 </p>
<p>That’s true, but I think they were looking for “2”. Man, really should have exploited this as a child…</p>
<p>Would have been fun to make completely new types of math with different axioms to make all my tests trivial :P</p>
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<p>I didn’t mean that would answer your question haha. I don’t know how to solve it, I just know it’s li(x). We haven’t covered that integral in AP Calc…
although it would make for an interesting discussion with the interviewer!</p>
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<p>Lol, I’ve tried that before… teachers weren’t too amused :p</p>
<p>just a girl - My Sr year, I worked in admissions doing interviews. However, this was a few years and under a different director of admissions, so things might have changed. Interviews are(were)(whatever) pretty informal, and an attempt to get a better feel for your personality, esp with regards to academics and sciences. There are no “gotcha” type knowledge questions. When I was conducting them, we tried to keep them around 50 minutes, to allow time in between each to record our thoughts. Which brings up another point, a lot of the interviewers at mudd did not record notes during the session, but rather wrote a summary after. Since you are interviewing really ahead of the start of the next admission season, its likely the interviewer won’t have the luxury of being able to read a complete file on you - so be prepared for more wide open questions. For others who might interview later in the year, after sending a lot of material in, prepare for specific questions, especially if there is something glaring in your record (such as that D in sophomore year math). Most of the admissions staff used to keep great snacks in their office - take advantage of this, it can mark the proud start of a long tradition of getting free food from your college. I’m more or less rambling now, but if you have more specific questions, please post.</p>