Mr. G and I have been on a bit of a hiatus.
Since our last posts we have been busy with the more immediate tasks of helping our students finish up their essays and applications, rounding up our first semesters at our new schools and trying to get a little "us" time racked up. (For him, that means spending time with his lovely wife and family; for me that means studying Portuguese in São Salvador on the Northeast Coast of Brazil: you can decide the winner...)
However now is a good time to get back into the G&T flow as many of you will be facing (or have recently faced) your college interviews. Getting that phone call can be both exciting and terrifying, but you should know three things before either jumping for joy or casting yourself into a pit of despair:
- College interviews are largely informal and friendly. They are conducted (mostly) by alumni of the college you are applying to who are usually young, engaging professionals whose mission is more to entice you to accept an eventual admissions offer than to decide whether or not you get in to the school.
- Because they are informal, college interviews usually seem much easier than students previously imagine. They are not like the challenging job interviews you see on television. They are more about getting to know you, making sure that in-person you reflect the information presented in your application and letter of reference, and answering your questions about the school. Again, your potential school wants to make sure you eventually choose them if they offer you a position in their freshman class. The interview is as much a pitch for the college as it is a inquiry into you as a potential student.
- Interviews rarely, rarely make or break a candidate. They are, primarily, meant to verify what your college has read about you. That being said, well-conducted interviews have certainly been the "straw" in the past. There is no reason for you not to make the most of this opportunity.
Now, there are thousands of advice columns on blogs, newspaper sites and posted by organizations like the Collegboard and Aristotle Circle. Thus, we are not going to re-hash age-old advice that you can get in many other places. (Other than this article by Dave Marcus that was published in the New York Times which I find to succinctly convey most of the advice spread across thousands of web pages in one page.) We are going to cull that advice to offer you 4 sound practices of being a successful interviewee to arm yourself with. These practices touch on specific strategies that we have found other sources of advice dance around, but do not directly address or recommend.
Here are the 4 key practices behind a successful college interview:
1. Be yourself. Your BEST self. This is clichéd advice, but it is still some of the best. At the point of your interview, your school has reviewed your application, read your essays and verified your potential via your letters of reference. Now, they really do want to learn more about you. So bring your full personality to the interview and show who you are to the interviewer. That being said, don't act like the interviewer is your buddy. If to you"being yourself" means showing up in pajamas and talking street to your interviewer, I need you to re-think your definition.
I've heard some coaches advise students to act as if the interviewer one of the parents of their boyfriend or girlfriend who they are meeting for the first time, or a potential employer. There is some value in these illusions if you are being interviewed by a dean or a professor. But most college interviewers are alumni so I would recommend rather that you act like...you are trying out for the basketball team and meeting the starting center for the first time, or you are talking to an older participant of the museum program you really want to join, or you are meeting the senior intern at the NGO you want to volunteer at. I think you see my point: acting like your interviewer is the adult who is potentially standing between your love life or your livelihood will make you come off too formal and rigid. Acting like the interviewer is an interesting older peer will help you frame your attitude and behavior in just the right way. You will not bow and scrape and speak in clipped, contraction-less sentences, but you will be engaging and enthusiastic. You won't show up in a three-piece suit and only cross your legs if your interviewer crosses hers, but you won't wear jeans, text your friends and crack your gum during the interview either.
Play out a suitable scenario like the one above in your head--it works.
2. Use anecdotes. Tell a story. The easiest way to tell your interviewer about yourself is to be convincingly and truthfully autobiographical. The "show don't tell" rules that apply in good writing apply equally to interviewing. Use details! Use examples! Illustrate! Evoke! This advice is best explained through example:
Question: What has been the most significant experience of your life that took you outside your comfort zone?
Answer 1:
I think it was the time I was running for Secretary of the NHS at my school. I had never done something like that before and I was pretty scared. In the end I won the election and I am happy to have the experience, but it was very difficult getting through it.
Answer 2:
Running for NHS Secretary. Most of my friends think I am pretty confident, but I was terrified of giving my speech in front of the other NHS candidates and the seniors. I spent days working on my candidate speech: I wrote ideas on notecards, practiced in front of the mirror and read speeches by Martin Luther King, Obama and Kennedy: they are better at it than me, by the way. I did this entirely in private. I think I was most scared of others opinion of me: everyone thinks I am assured and "aggressive" so I felt that showing them any sign of weakness would make me look weaker than the other candidates. In the end, I didn't really need to worry, my hard work paid off, I beat my opponent in a landslide and my teachers talked about my impact on the NHS group for days. I only wish that at the time I had been able to focus on getting the work done rather than on what other people thought of me. It's something I still need to work on.
It's clear which is the superior answer. #2 does not go into elaborate detail, but it uses several concrete details, and empathetic humor, to illustrate and evoke. It much more clearly and engagingly conveys the experience and how the interviewee grew as a person because it. It is both descriptive and reflective.
Think about conversations you have with your friends. Do you convey experiences through terse colorless descriptions, or do you go into intense detail about how people react, how you reacted, the special language people used, the appearance of the key characters, what the weather was like, how you felt that day, etc? We all love to hear and tell stories--that's what good conversation is.
This advice having been given, be careful not to blather on for too long. Be descriptive, but don't talk your interviewer into a coma. I have always recommended mentally structuring each answer to a direct interview question as a well-formed paragraph: no more, no less.
3. Fill in the gaps. Thus far, you have been represented by a portfolio of reports, letters and essays: what were you unable to express through your application? What do you still want your school to know about before they make their decision? The interview is the place for letting them know.
Some contrasting experiences from the Marcus article mentioned above:
Oh, well. My questions rarely matter. Applicants don’t seem to realize that relatively brief alumni interviews hardly ever make or break a candidate’s case.
Risa Lewak, who interviews for her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, recalls an exchange with a young man who showed up with his mother.
“He didn’t say a word and barely nodded at me,” says Ms. Lewak, author of the recently published “Don’t Stalk the Admissions Officer” (Ten Speed Press).
The mom said she would answer questions because her son had “a sore throat bordering on laryngitis.” Ms. Lewak offered to reschedule. She never heard from them again.
Another candidate, after declaring her love of singing, belted out several verses of “I Dreamed a Dream” from “Les Misérables,” making Ms. Lewak miserable.
Once in a while, though, a little positive, face-to-face time can sway a decision-maker. After being rejected from the University of Northern Colorado last year, Tyler Cobb requested a meeting with an admissions counselor.
She discussed details that were missing from her application. She and her mother had been living in their car after her mother’s fiancé, who supported them, was injured in Iraq. Ms. Cobb explained that her grades had dropped amid the chaos.
She’s now in her first year on campus, and doing well.
This is not to say that everyone will have missing information as dramatic as the example above, but the application process can hardly encapsulate everything that makes you who you are. If you have extensive family responsibilities, if you commute for 3 hours each day, if you just bombed that first SAT because you were a nervous wreck and couldn't sleep--say it! However, say it in a way that shows you are not looking for a pity party, but have learned from a challenging experience or aspect of your life. Be clear about what has weighed you down, but be sure to show that it has served to make you stronger.
At the same time, use the interview as an opportunity to talk about positive elements of yourself that have been left out. Think of all of those "lost" experiences you weren't able to fit in your essays: the poetry slam you MCed for; your fascination with computer programming discussion forums; that hike upstate you did with your church group; the way you taught your little sister how to ride a bike, or play soccer or find the radius of a circle; not your general "tutoring" experience, but that one time you helped your 7th grade tutee to get his first 70 on a test, not a B not an A but that beautiful, glorious 70!
And don't forget all of the things you've been up to since you sent in your application. It's not like your meaningful experiences ended as soon as you hit "submit" at CommonApp.org. (Right?)
Now is the time to mention them.
4. Conduct mock interviews. It matters less whether you do this with friends or teachers or parents and matters more that you DO THEM. Practice really does make perfect. And, having said it doesn't matter who you do them with, I am going to strongly recommend you do mock interviews with a mix of interviewees and observers and all such mixes should include sessions with peers. NOBODY will be as simultaneously candid and supportive as your peers. If you do this in a group of 4 or more, you will receive multiple perspectives and diverse feedback. What one friend misses, another one will pick up. Also, by observing several other students interview, you will get a much better idea of what you need to do in order to to succeed as an interviewee. (Potential interview questions can be found all over the Internet. A brief search will turn up more than you could ever use. Just pick a few of the more common ones and run with those. Here's one article with 13 of the most common questions.)
Finally, as terrifying as that advice is, I have a suggestion even more horrific: if at all possible, get your hands on a digital camera and record yourself being interviewed. Nothing will show you with more clarity how you look, sound and act than the recorded image of the actual event. I am not going to act like this is not a heart-rending and soul-crushing experience--I have seen myself teaching through the lens of the camera too often not to sympathize--but I also know through experience that nothing works better. And in the age of the Smartphone, you have no excuse not to try it out. May Buddha protect you.
Some advice on mock (and real) interviews:
1. Ask current events questions. Some interviewers like to see if you are engaged. Another quote from the Marcus Article:
When I do alumni interviews for Brown University, I look for a critical thinker, someone who has insatiable curiosity about everything from literature to science. Recently I started asking applicants to name their representative in Congress. I get quite a few dull stares. Same when I suggest that students discuss an article they’ve read in the past two days in a newspaper or magazine, in print or online.
Interviewers really do ask questions like this. So the flip-side to "ask current events questions" is "make sure you are up on current events!"
Here's little warm-up for you: Who is the Vice-President of the United States? If you had to think about that for even a second, you need to do some readin', hoss.
2. Always have your interviewers prepare surprise questions. Questions like: "If you could pick any color to describe your attitude toward success, what would it be?" Or my personal favorite based on a University of Chicago application essay question from a few years back: "If you could be any common table condiment, which would you be, and why?"
Sometimes interviewers do ambush you with random questions like this, but the real value in asking them during mock interviews is not to construct rational answers, but to see how you handle being thrown for a loop. If you can meet a question like the one above with poise--whether you answer it directly or not--you are going to look pretty sharp.
For the record, the best student response I ever received to the condiment question was, "I would be wasabi, because I'm potent, Asian and can make people cry."
3. About poise: Don't worry if you can't answer a specific question with rapier wit. During an interview you are absolutely able to ask for a second to think about a question, to request a different question, or to admit that you are stumped. It's just a matter of how you do it. Stay in control and stay in good humor. Also, remember that by staying in control and giving your interviewer sincere answers, you are guiding the direction the interview will take. (See Example 3 below.)
Example 1:
- Interviewer: If you could pick any color to describe your attitude toward success, what would it be?
- Interviewee: Uh...well...hmmmm. [Pause for 30 seconds]
- Interviewer: Would you like me to repeat the question?
- Interviewee: No. Uh. Let me think. Well....[Pause for 30 more uncomfortable seconds of silence.]
- Interviewer: Let's just move on.
- Interviewee: Can we? Phew.
Example 2:
- Interviewer: If you could pick any color to describe your attitude toward success, what would it be?
- Interviewee: What?
- Interviewer: If you could pick any color to describe your attitude toward success, what would it be?
- Interviewee: [Skeptical look on face.] Uh, look. Can I get a different question?
- Interviewer: Okay...If you could be any common...
Example 3:
- Interviewer: If you could pick any color to describe your attitude toward success, what would it be?
- Interviewee: Wow. That came out of nowhere.
- Interviewer: [Laughs] Would you like a different question?
- Interviewee: No, no. Just give a second to think. [15 seconds of bemused silence]. OK. Gold is too cliché because of the whole Olympics thing, so I am going with purple.
- Interviewer: Purple?
- Interviewee: Yes, purple. Purple is my girlfriend's favorite color, and I consider somehow convincing her to go out with me my greatest success. [Interviewer laughs] so I am rolling with purple.
- Interviewer: [Laughing] OK. OK. Tell me more about your girlfriend. Why is this such a success story...?
Example 4:
- Interviewer: If you could pick any color to describe your attitude toward success, what would it be?
- Interviewee: Wait, color? Hmmm. I've never thought about connecting a color to success. But I do have a favorite song that I always associate with success.
- Interviewer: OK. Tell me about the song....
It's easy to see which of these examples are strong responses--even when not providing direct answers to the asked questions--and which are not. Remember:
- Stay in control.
- Stay in good humor.
- Maintain poise.
- Guide the conversation in a way that works in your favor.
As soon as you realize that your college interview is not an interrogation but is about striking up a conversation and maintaining a dialogue that is all about you, it will be easy to ease into the attitude you should approach the experience with. You will also find the interview goes smoothly: just as if it were a conversation.
As always, if any reader has any doubts or questions she can contact either Mr. G or me.
Best of luck!
--WJT.
Final thought:
Never forget there are no right or wrong answers, just ones that show how interesting, unique and confident you are, and ones that don't.