@LindsayHarvard ok sure basically after I was accepted early due to academics and the rest of the good letters of rec and decent essays, I would say that my main EC is what they liked: classical double bass. Now I had stuff for my major (econ/pre-haas) and some other stuff but the regents part is where it gets interesting.
I am walking into the main hall where all the regents kids had their interviews. I find out that I am slotted for a haas professor in finance, which is what I want to go into. However, my app looks very odd because I indicated I wanted to go into business as a music/econ major, so I was like three majors to this guy. I expected to be asked about financial stuff, the economy, but no we just talked about classical music. Even though he was EXTREMELY Russian, he hated Russian composers. So, naturally as a huge fan of Shostakovitch, I debated him to no end and I discussed why he is better than is predecessors and modern contemporaries. Luckily, I was smart enough to blend this discussion into other side tangents that would make me seem smart. Eventually, after that ended, the typical questions about the economy came out, and then eventually the idea of “imitation economies” was brought up, basically the idea that a country could copy the economy of another nation when building. Instead of going off of that, the conversation instead spiraled into musical imitation and eventually how all rap is simply an imitation of Dr. Dre/west coast rappers. As a rap fan, I naturally debated this as well and said that east coast rap is inherently different because it speaks on struggle rather than bravado. He then looked at his watch and realized we were out of time, and I’ll never forget what happened:
He looks at me panicked and asks me what other schools have I applied to/got accepted to. At the time it was early in the process, so i did not have impressive wins, but before I could say anything he simply said “ah it does not matter, I just have to prevent you from going there”. He said “follow me” and we walked to the highest authority in the building, basically stiff arming the next interviewee. Once we found the person he was looking for he asked her “hey, I had a great interview with this guy and I was wondering if we could decide on his scholarship right now, like right now”. Naturally, she said she could not do that and so he wrote a note about my interview and placed it into my file. All the while he said a joke and I nervously laughed and he laughed legitimately prompting the lady to say “its almost like you two know each other”, prompting more laughs from me and my interviewer. Once he was done, he shook my hand and said he had a wonderful time and was now going to get some food, and then straight up left. The lady stood there in shock, said that that never happened before, and took my resume and letters of rec.
Basically, what got me the scholarship (given the original criteria as @LindsayHarvard posted) was that my interviewer did not want me to go to another (im thinking he thought) better school, even though I never got one. Sorry for the long write up