<p>My mom keeps getting excited every time I get an interview for a college I want to go to, and each time I try to tell her "Its just an interview! It basically doesn't count!" I've heard that a good interview can tip the scale in your favor and a bad interview can't really hurt, and a lot of candidates don't even get interviews! So am I going crazy, or is it my mom? She thinks that since I got an interview, they'd like to take a 'closer look' at me, and if they knew they were going to reject me they wouldn't give me an interview at all. What do you all think?</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/yale-university/804985-alumni-campus-interview-faq.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/yale-university/804985-alumni-campus-interview-faq.html</a></p>
<p>To your last point, your contact info was spit out to the area interview coordinator before a human being looked at your application even once. Yale doesn’t presort whom to interview or not. You could be a shoo-in or insanely unrealistic applicant: you still would have been on that interviewer’s docket.</p>
<p>I actually think the OP has it backwards: It’s very hard for a good interview to tip the scale in your favor, but a terrible interview can kill you. </p>
<p>The best that can happen is that the interview confirms what people are seeing on paper and makes them more comfortable believing it (which in turn might tip the scale in your favor). My daughter had one of the best interviews ever for her ED college, and it didn’t keep her from being deferred then rejected. (“Best interview ever”: the interviewer, also president of the large local alumni club, who had never met me, called me up as soon as my daughter left his office to say he thought she was the best candidate for this particular college he had ever interviewed in 20 years of active interviewing. He had just called the admissions office to tell them that because it was late in the process, and he felt like I should know it, too, since he would want to know if someone was that bowled over by one of his kids. If that didn’t help, it’s hard to imagine what would.)</p>
<p>On the other hand, a truly disastrous interview will create some real uncertainty, even if a candidate looks great on paper, and with a hyper-selective college any real uncertainty means a negative outcome. What I’m talking about here is not merely an awkward interview, or one where the participants basically don’t like one another. It’s an interview where the interviewer gets the feeling that the applicant is a fraud, or horribly arrogant, or maybe mentally ill in an undisclosed way. It would be very hard for an unhooked applicant to get admitted despite having something like that in the file, unless it were basically clear that the interviewer was unbalanced him- or herself. If an interview has any value at all to an admissions department – and it’s not clear at all that it does, other than as a recruitment tool, i.e., as another way to engage applicants with the college, so that an accepted applicant is more likely to enroll – it would be in making certain that an applicant passes the smell test with an actual human being who has no incentive to lie on his behalf.</p>
<p>I guess I meant to say that an interview can’t hurt you unless the school is not sure that they want to accept you. For example, on my columbia interview, on off the first things my interviewer told me was not to stress because an interview can’t help/hurt much. He said he had written horrible recommendations for people and they were still accepted. He basically was saying, “if the school wants you, they want you, and I can’t change that.” I guess interviews can only be helpful/harmful if their is uncertainty regarding the student. If they are on the border, a disastrous interview would probably knock them off of being admitted.</p>