What never to do at an interview

Colleges & Universities A-Z Brown University
1

<p>The idea that the interview is not the biggest factor in admissions is an understatement for some colleges and a gross distortion for others. In my particular case, my rejections came from the colleges with the worst interviews. </p>

<p>Here are things not to do:

  1. DO NOT COME TOO EARLY (This is as bad as coming late, especially if you interrupt your interviewer’s business conference.)
  2. DO NOT GET INTO A POLITICAL DEBATE WITH YOUR INTERVIEWERS (This is especially bad if your interviewer is a die-hard conservative and you are a strong-headed liberal or vice versa.)
  3. DO NOT MENTION OTHER COLLEGES. Seriously, this may be obvious, but it slips out more easily than you think. Though mentioning you were good enough to get into Yale early-action looks impressive, it comes off brazenly braggish, no matter which perspective you take it from.
  4. I have never heard of anyone who as actually done this, but for those prospective students applying to Brown, do not breathe the name Emma Watson or the name of any other one of Brown’s numerous “celebrities.” Period. I so do not get this obsession. Trust me, neither would your interviewer.</p>
2

<p>Just to do my job and (partially) negate everything Seeker said, from the perspective of an interviewer:</p>

<p>Intro’. The interview is not a big factor. In terms of your acceptances, you’re dealing with a causation vs. correlation issue. Can it confirm good or bad suspicions about your file, and therefore change things? Oh yeah. Does it usually? No. To make them matter more would be to stake an applicant’s chances on the luck of the draw about which interviewer they get. </p>

<p>Interviews are as much for the benefit of the alumnus and the applicant as they are for making more informed admissions decisions. </p>

<p>1’. I hope for your sake that you won’t be interviewing with people in their offices for most of your college interviews. Brown certainly seems to discourage us from interviewing in offices. If you’re in an office, you can get there as much as ten minutes early and you should be totally fine, or your interviewer shouldn’t be doing interviews. If you’re interviewing somewhere public, get there as early as you’d like.</p>

<p>Being late is undeniably worse than being early.</p>

<p>2’. Sure, don’t be stupid about choice of topics and how you approach them. But if you have strong interests in politics and you’re keeping yourself from discussing them, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. I would be glad to have a lively debate with a conservative applicant, just like I loved having a debate with an applicant about prescriptivist linguistics - he got a great write-up, even though I disagreed with him.</p>

<p>3’. If you do anything in a braggish manner, you’re dumb. However, I like when applicants bring up other schools, because I’m technically prohibited from discussing other schools but hearing applicants feelings about them gives me an idea of how the applicant is approaching the application process.</p>

<p>4’. If you have a young interviewer who is still connected to the campus, and you mention Emma Watson in the context of a joke about application numbers going up, and it’s clear that it’s just a joke and has nothing to do with why you’re applying, you’ll probably get points. If you say you’ve heard of the school because she goes there, you probably won’t.</p>

<p>In sum, the interview is a conversation between two people, one an applicant, and one an alum. The best thing an interviewee can do to figure out how to approach the interview is to put themselves in the shoes of the other person: If I was this alum, given their age, experiences, line of work, etc., what would I be comfortable talking about? What would I be able to talk about? What would I have fun talking about?</p>

<p>Nothing is strictly off limits (within the limits of decency and legality), and nothing is strictly on the table. Use your head and figure out what will be okay and what won’t. Brown is a very open place, and the best interviewers should be representative of that spirit of openness.</p>

3

<p>I don’t think that disagreeing with the interviewer’s view on politics is negative. Of course, it looks stupid if you dissent without laying out a coherent and logical argument as to why the interviewer’s view might be wrong. But the sheer fact that you disagree is not bad at all. And frankly, from Brown graduates, I expect that they are capable of leading a political discussion without having personal bad feelings.</p>

4

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<p>Yeah, I kept calling Brown ‘Purple’ for the first 15 minutes of the interview. In my defense, I was pretty out of it because of the night before…</p>

<p>Anyway, your advice is good… you know, if Brown interviewers are all strict businessmen without secretaries but with one-track minds when it comes to Brown and politics.</p>