As interview season is coming around, many high school seniors are focusing on ways to prepare and present themselves for the last piece of their application. These interviews are conducted with alumni of the university who volunteer to talk to applicants at coffee shops or over Zoom. While all other components of your application are more important than the alumni interview, having a strong presentation and personality at your interview can sometimes make a strong impact on your application, especially if you are on the verge of acceptance or rejection.
One of the most important things to implement in your interview is to shift your mindset from an interview in which one person is pointing questions at another to a two-sided conversation where both people are learning more about each other, their interests, and their experiences. Stay calm and try to talk about yourself and your experiences in the most precise and easy-going way that you can.
Just focus on being yourself, and try to establish rapport/friendship with the interviewer. Some of my friends were Alumni interviewers for several top colleges, and the interviewees who stand out the most to them are the ones who are not only very impressive but also the ones who are able to engage an interesting conversation about anything.
One way to adopt a mindset that the interview is more of a conversation is to ask the interviewer questions about their own experiences from the college, their favorite memories of the institution, what field they ended up pursuing, whether they changed their mind in college and why, and how they think that the college helped them grow in their own career. Remember that interviewers are regular people too, and the fact that they’ve volunteered to interview for their undergraduate college means that they have in some way been impacted positively by that college and are happy to meet new students and help guide them on their journey, even if it’s not with their own college.
I learned a lot from my interviewers after learning how to ask open-ended and interesting questions, and their answers helped me greatly to shape my own interests, plan out my own future, and learn about so many fields that existed, even if they were not fields that I knew anything about.
Try imagining yourself as an interviewer 10 years in the future from that university. You could be asking and answering the same types of questions, and you would naturally want to do your best job to give accurate and honest descriptions of your experiences.
I once asked my alumni interviewer for a Stanford interview who was a doctor whether he had any regrets about his college experience or anything that he would have changed in retrospect. His answer taught me a lot about my approaching my own college experience – he said that he was so focused on becoming a doctor for his whole life, that he shut himself out from any other opportunities in his life. Even though he became an extremely successful doctor, he regrets not looking/learning from his peers and from his college about other opportunities, especially because the time that he was at the school (around year 2000), the internet was being created and advanced by students at Stanford.
Going in with a mindset that you have a lot to learn and grow from your interview experience can help you calm your nerves, ask good questions, and learn more from the conversation. It can help you be more easy-going and develop your skills in communication and friendliness.
Learning about their experiences and their career path and how they view their college choices and their decisions overall was very helpful for me to figure out if I want to be a doctor, what’s the best college for me, what types of clubs/activities I should be looking for, how difficult of a path/college courses I should take, etc.
Asking questions like this really helps you to continue the conversation, and make the interview feel more like a discussion about two people rather than targeted questions to one person.
I’ll write out a list of questions that you should try to create an outline for yourself, and then ask a friend, a parent, or a sibling to ask you some of these questions as practice before your interview. Make sure that your answers to these questions are just outlines and not full writeups because it’s important to deliver answers that seem genuine rather than scripted. A lot of these questions are interview questions that I’ve had asked to me, are common interview questions, or that some of my friends are trained to ask as interviewers. I also included some of the questions that were asked to me from a variety of different schools.
1. Tell me about yourself
2. What did you do last summer?
3. Why do you want to go to Harvard?
4. What do you want to study and why?
5. What did you do for extracurriculars at your college, and what did you learn from them?
6. Some creative questions, such as – what TV show do you really like, and if you were a character in that show, which one would you be and how would you act?
7. What do you want to do in your future?
8. Who’s your favorite person to talk to?
9. What’s your favorite subject in school?
10. What’s something you really like about your high school, and what’s something that you would like to change?
11. What other colleges are you applying to?
12. Do you have any questions for me?
Naturally, there will be a whole host of questions that they could ask you. The focus shouldn’t be on how to answer specific questions, but how to tailor your answers/best qualities into the conversation. Answering a few of the possible questions that they could ask you will help your brain find patterns in how you answer things, and then you can implement those strategies/patterns much more effectively when answering interview questions.
I hope this writeup was helpful for you or your child for approaching college interviews. Feel free to always send us an email if you have any questions! Hope you stay safe and continue to learn and take things away from all your experiences!
Cheers,
Naman
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