Hi everyone,
It is Regular Action interview season, and I’m posting this thread in the hopes that some of my advice is helpful to high school seniors. I’m a recent college graduate who has served as an alumni interviewer. When I was applying, although I received great interviewing advice from my peers, mentors, and school counsellor, a lot of this advice was not something I found on the web, so I decided to create this thread now that I have a better idea of what alumni interviewers are looking for.
My approach led me to receive admission offers from multiple T5s and Ivies, some great state schools, and merit scholarships at some T50 private universities and LACs as a low-income, non-legacy, Asian international student requiring full financial aid (my country normally has 3-10 students admitted every year to most T10s). While there are several components I believe contributed to my success through the process, I can most confidently speak about alumni interviews, and even though their contribution to the overall process may not be significant, there are some ways to interview that make it significantly easier for the alumni interviewer to advocate for a student.
Since I had a primarily STEM background and most of my alumni interviews so far have been with STEM candidates, my examples (and advice) are probably most useful to STEM applicants applying to highly competitive top schools, although I hope that some of it can also be applicable to students interviewing with other disciplines. I will also put a disclaimer that different interviewers have different strategies and it is perfectly natural for other folks to disagree with what I am saying and for several students to get acceptances without doing the things I mention in this post – I am only speaking for what works for me and how I advocate for students, especially in a pool where there are several impressive candidates to choose from.
With that out of the way, let me begin.
The Role of the Alumni Interviewer
The biggest mistake I myself made, and the mistake I see most often, is the belief that your goal in the interview is to impress the alumni interviewer. This is an incorrect assumption: there are several interviews where I have been very impressed by the student’s achievements but unable to write a good summary of the interview for them. The interviewer is not an admissions counselor who is, in some way, measuring your achievements against those of others – the interviewer is someone you need to collaborate with so that they can put forward the best argument for why you deserve to get into the school. Several interviewers take pride when the candidates they interview are accepted, and we often want as many of them to be accepted as possible, since we took so much time to learn about them.
In this regard, what I strongly encourage students to think about while reading the rest of the guide that there is often no “correct” way of answering an interview question – there are simply opportunities for you to give reasons that the interviewer can use to support your candidacy. Missing a single opportunity by itself will not cause your interviewer to be unable to support you well, but it is important to take advantage of as many opportunities as you can. From now on, I will call answers that make it easy for interviewers to find these justifications as “easy” answers, and answers that make it more difficult for them to make the same justifications as “difficult” answers, since the interviewer has to think more about how to phrase your response to best support your candidature. Most of the answers one receives over the course of an admissions interview can be interpreted positively in favor of the student, and several interviewers do so – some answers are just easier to work with, and this guide will talk about some of these answers.
Here is a hint - when interviewers say that the goal of the alumni interview is to get to know you outside the application, they mean it. If my interview summary ends up being a rehash of the resume you submitted on your application, no matter how impressive, it means that the admissions committee did not learn anything new from the interview, and so it is likely that this is at best a weak signal and anything I say will be discarded from their assessment. This is a shame, because my summary could have been something that is much more positive and helpful.
How does the problem of trying to impress an interviewer manifest in interviews? I remember telling my own interviewers about several awards I had won. On reflection, that time would probably have been spent better trying to understand what their motivations were for asking certain questions (and trying to better answer those underlying motivations). While interviewing, I have noticed that some students not only mention their awards, but try to give me context around the awards they have won or the camps or research programs they have attended by saying these are selective, or explaining the selection process, or the structure of the program, ** even when the question was not asking specifically about that **. As an interviewer, if I have a clarification question on the meaning of what a specific activity is, or what a selective summer program is, I will ask it. By spending time justifying how prestigious or selective something is, you are losing valuable time that you could have spent on telling me why exactly you participated in it. Often, that is what I am more interested in, but because students seek to impress the interviewer, it costs them valuable response time. It is often perfectly fine if you provide me with context for one specific award or something that was deeply meaningful, but if you do it repeatedly or for a long period of time to impress me, I am going to struggle to keep track of trying to find out what I actually want to know: why the accomplishment was important enough ** to you ** to pursue it.
Here is an example of what good and difficult management of time might look like:
Me: Tell me about a project you worked on.
Answer 1: I worked on a project as part of XYZ program, which is a selective …… <spends 5 sentences talking about the program and how students are selected for it, then tells me about the project you did as a part of the program>.
Answer 2: I worked on project. . I worked on it as part of XYZ program. <starts talking about XYZ program, its selectivity/prestige, and its selection process unprompted>.
Answer 3: I was drawn to this problem because <explains what attracted you to the problem, then explains the challenges associated with the problem>. I worked on this as a part of XYZ program.
Answer 3 answers what I am truly trying to understand: how you choose problems and tackle difficult challenges. If I want to know about program XYZ, I will ask you about it, and I would encourage you to explain it to me in a couple of sentences. The thing about answer 2 is that although you did somewhat answer the question, it is now harder for me keep track of your original answer since you have begun speaking about something that is not going to help me write my interview summary (I can maybe spare 1 sentence in my summary at most to say that you did XYZ, which is a selective program – the rest has to be devoted to you and your interests). Answer 2 also prevents me from asking follow up questions about the project ABC, since we are time constrained and we lost time because you were talking about the program. Answer 1 is the most difficult of all – by the time you get to the project, while I have an understanding of the program you participated in, I will probably have the understanding that the reason you did the project is because your program made you do it, which means that I cannot accurately assess your motivation to answer how you choose problems. Like I previously said, all three of the answers can be positively interpreted by the interviewer, but the problem lies in difficulty: it is much more difficult to write a good summary of answer 1 or 2 than of answer 3. This is because I can be a more enthusiastic advocate when I know a student’s motivations for working on specific problems and I can use their own words to describe why they choose to work on certain problems.
A good thing to take away from this is that no matter what your own opinion of your accomplishments is, it is equally likely that someone with a more “prestigious” award/accomplishment answers in a more “difficult” way in the interview than you do. It is my opinion that students spend time justifying how impressive their accomplishments are for two reasons: 1) because most college admissions interview advice recommends students brag about their accomplishments and 2) some students feel underconfident about the accomplishment in question, so they try to impress upon the interviewer how important it is (since they consider it to be one of the most important parts of their application). If you ever feel the need to explain why an accomplishment is significant during the application process, then a good idea is to it in the application itself, since the significance is often evaluated by admissions officers. Again, your goal during the interview is not to impress the interviewer. It is not necessarily bad advice to brag about your accomplishments, but using a sales metaphor, it is very important that you “sell” your accomplishments, but it is equally important to make them yours – talk about why you did certain things, why it was difficult for you, and the actions you took to overcome that difficulty. Try to keep award or program descriptions to 1-2 sentences during the interview – it is much less important for you to sell the accomplishment itself during the interview than it is for you to sell what you did to get it and why it was difficult.
The Project Question: Talking About Accomplishments
Often, during an interview, it is possible you get a question asking you about a project you have worked on, or your most significant accomplishment, or a question about how you developed your academic interests. The easiest answer to advocate for a student in this situation is when I get a response that tells a complete story in 3 steps: how you started working on a problem or area, what you did, and what was the end goal/result of the project. We shall refer to these questions as step 1, 2, and 3 respectively throughout this section.
(Sidenote: sometimes, an interviewer may rephrase this to simply ask you about how you tackle difficult problems or how do you identify which problems are important, and the answer here should remain exactly the same. Some students tend to answer questions like the last two by making general statements like “I usually do X” or “I look to Y for inspiration” – almost always, a better idea is to pick a specific example of a project you worked on, talk about it, and say something along the lines of “I did X in this case, and usually, that is what I do in these situations”. This in lines of the “show don’t tell” advice that is fairly prevalent for college admissions interviews.)
A fantastic piece of interview advice I actually recommend is to think much before the interview about one such project that kickstarted your interest in your intended major/area of study and how your actions over the course of that project reflect upon you. If you find that it reflects satisfactorily on you and it is something you would like to talk about for several minutes during your interview, you should practice answers to the three steps of the story for the interviewer.
The larger goal of a question like this is manifold: the interviewer wants to know your academic interests and this is a good way to learn more about you, but the interviewer is often trying to understand how you choose problems to work on and how you tackle challenges that come up. A tertiary goal is also to understand how well you work with others, especially in groups, and so if it is a group project and some issues occurred, expect follow-up questions about those issues were resolved, although good ideas for those responses will be covered in the Challenge Questions topic.
The most important thing about answering this question is actually choosing an appropriate project in the first place. Several students take this moment to pitch what they believe is their most impressive accomplishment or award and tell the story of how they won the award, alongside of all the pitfalls around impressing the interviewer that I talked about in the previous section. The best answer to this question is not determined by how important or impressive the project was, and nor is it determined by how prestigious the final award won in step 3 was. The best answers I have heard to these questions have ranged from published papers stemming from science fairs to school projects submitted a day before the deadline. The important thing about choosing a project is to choose one where you have good answers for all 3 steps, and you can “collaborate” with the interviewer to give them good reasons that can answer the questions they are actually trying to understand.
Here is an example of a project that is difficult for interviewers to write about: a homework project that was assigned by a teacher with clear guidelines around the topic and a clear method that you were asked to follow. Immediately, talking about such a project rules out any questions an interviewer might want to ask about step 1 or step 2 – the answer is obviously going to be that you did so because a teacher told you to do so. You may feel like the project was of sufficient difficulty, and that you successfully answered the question. The interviewer may also ask you follow ups about the project in question. But here, you missed an opportunity for them to write about how you can identify challenging problems on your own and figure out ways to tackle them, which is exactly the kind of self-motivation that the admissions committee would love to see that isn’t immediately obvious from your application. Now, extend this idea to doing a research project that you say you started because your research mentor told you this was an exciting problem and gave you the tools needed to succeed in it: does it really matter how impressive the award or outcome in step 3 is? If you pick this kind of a project and say in all of your answers that steps 1 and 2 were due to external factors, no matter the difficulty of the project or the final awards won, you will still have missed an opportunity for the interviewer to write something strong about your application regarding those steps.
The most important decision with respect to Project Questions is to pick an appropriate project, and then spend some time thinking about how to frame the story. Everyone draws inspiration from others, and nobody expects you to have succeeded without your mentors, teachers, and friends. Yet, the assumption underlying this question is that there is always a reason why you chose to do something. If you have worked on a project for a significant amount of time on your own in any manner, there is a reason behind that decision, and what interviewers want to know is what that reason was. What kinds of problems excite you? What approaches did you try? What worked, what didn’t, and why?
An answer to this question that is extremely easy to write about does a few things. Firstly, it ties the project to your main academic interest that you are applying to college for – the project itself does not have to be directly in the same field, but you should try to talk about the similarities in both fields, because again, the interviewer is trying to understand exactly how you get excited about problems and areas of study (including your intended major). Secondly, through the story, you talk about a range of things that demonstrate the way you think through hard problems and approach them. Talk about what failed, talk about how you went about asking for help, talk about what you specifically did to ensure the project’s success. Finally, your story must be plausible – don’t try to oversell your interest in something at the risk of making your story less believable. It is far more realistic if you say you took a physics class in sophomore year which led to an interest in doing physics research than if you say you’ve been tinkering with lab instruments since age five and always knew you were going to be a physicist.
The Challenge Question: Talking About Adversity
This question is often framed as follows: tell us about a time when you faced adversity, or things didn’t go according to plan. How did you resolve those issues? Alternative phrasings of the same may involve talking explicitly about group projects, or making a challenging decision of some kind.
A good idea behind how to answer this kind of a question is to consider what has been asked in the interview so far. If you have not been asked for an equivalent of a project question, you should take this opportunity to talk about a project that satisfactorily answers the three steps of the story mentioned in the project question setup. However, if you have already been asked a project question or talked about your academic interests, you should take this opportunity to answer the question in a way that answers the tertiary concern of the interviewer in the previous section: how well do you work with others?
The key here, again, tends to be to choose a good project or situation. A good situation for a challenge question may not necessarily be a project where the difficulties were entirely academic or due to a lack of resources – if you have already talked about how you deal with challenging academic problems or logistic hurdles, doing so again here might be inefficient. Instead, a good situation talks about a time where the challenge itself involves other people, and involves a situation where you took some initiative to resolve or mitigate the situation in some way.
What would be a difficult situation for the interviewer to work with in response to this question? I think that it is important that you show that you can recognize the stakes of the issue at hand, and you convey these stakes appropriately to the interviewer. For example, a difficult situation to write about can be having a relatively minor disagreement with a friend that was quickly resolved. It is generally a bad idea to disparage others or blame the situation on mistakes made by other people in this situation, so you will most likely struggle to accurately characterize the situation in the first place and explain it to the interviewer because of your worry of how the interviewer perceives the situation. You will also likely not have a good list of things you tried to do to resolve the situation other than giving it space and time and talking things out. Worst of all, if the interviewer is unable to understand the full nature of what was at stake (was it simply a minor disagreement or a friendship-ending argument?), then their perception of your actions might be inaccurate (they might feel like you overreacted or underreacted, and this would make it harder for them to say that you took some positive initiative to resolve the conflict).
A response that would be very easy for the interviewer to use to advocate for you would be a situation where you first realized something was amiss, and then took proactive steps to correct the situation. For example, if while working on a group project in your story, you realized that everyone was falling behind schedule, you should actively take credit for that realization. Talk about what led you to this realization and show that you actively pay attention to the things going on around you in life. If you feel that the root cause of such an issue was due to some external factors (such as logistic hurdles), mention that, but if you feel it was due to other people you were working with, it is extremely important that you refrain from overtly criticizing their actions (trust me, showing that you are respectful of your colleagues goes a long way). Then, talk about your actions. If you say you talked with everyone in the group to resolve your issues, say what happened during the conversations. Tell me what you felt like worked and didn’t work when it came to your efforts to resolve the situation. Interviewers are happy to learn about your “failures” as much as they are about your successes, and often, mentioning these things can leave an impression of you being a methodical and self-reflective person, which are qualities that interviewers value writing about far more than a simple end to the story where everything was happily resolved.
The College Interest Question: Why this College?
This is the question that is often the most straightforward to answer because unlike the previous two questions, there are only two things that the interviewer needs to help support your application here: for you to successfully convince them that you have put some thought into why the college/university is a good fit for you, and that you have a genuine interest in attending if accepted.
When I say a good fit, it means that you have thought about the characteristics of the college that draw you to it the most. The best way to appear convincing in your answers is to talk about aspects of your program that excite you the most and the opportunities that you want to explore here that you would not find anywhere else. In order to be convincing, it really helps to be specific – it does not matter what these characteristics are as long as they are relatively unique to the university. A response such as a “good STEM education” or an “academically rigorous curriculum” are difficult for interviewers to work with – there are several schools that offer the same benefits, and more importantly, how did relatively abstract concepts like that help motivate your decision to apply here? Contrast such a response with the fact that other applicants may mention specific research groups or professors they want to work with, or specific programs in their major that are available only at this school in particular. The more specific the answer, the better it demonstrates that you have thought seriously about the fact that you would fit will at the school.
A good rule of thumb in my opinion is also to avoid reasons for fit that may rely more on hearsay or factors outside of the school’s control. Several students make generalizations about campus culture based on their own perceptions of the student body, and this often manifests in the questions asked to the interviewer. It is rarely helpful to say that you would like to attend a specific school because you have heard that the student body fulfills certain properties – at best, it takes away space from a more detailed and specific answer, and at worst, your preconceived notions are entirely at odds with the interviewer’s own ideas about the student body based on their experience at the school. Everybody in a particular college does not think that the general campus culture description or stereotypes are an accurate reflection of the school’s student body, and it is important to keep this in mind while interacting with alumni. A similar criticism can be levied against location-based arguments for fit – saying that you wish to go to a college due to its location on a particular side of the country or in a particular state make it harder for an interviewer to argue that you have thought about fit in great detail.
The second part of the why this college question is for the interviewer to understand that you have a genuine interest in attending if you are accepted. Some of this is answered if you talk about specific parts of your academic program that you really like. But a better way to demonstrate genuine interest is to talk about what you see yourself doing at college – whether that conversation is around student groups you would like to join, leadership positions you would like to run for, or campus experiences you are excited about. Again, the more specific or unique the group, the better, and you are able to make a better case about the fact that you have put some thought into your life at the college after being admitted.
The Community Question: Talking About Your School and Your Community
Often, interviewers will ask you questions about what your school and your community looks like. The intention behind this question falls under broadly two areas. Firstly, this is a good way for the interviewer (and by extension, the admissions committee) to understand more about the student’s community and background. Secondly, it is a good way to understand the student’s own perceptions of their school and community.
A key concept that I keep returning to throughout this guide is the idea of understanding how exactly students choose the problems they want to work on and their own interests. One of the qualities that is really helpful for an interviewer to use to advocate for a student is their sensitivity to the needs of their community and the people around them. This can be demonstrated through their answers to any of several questions – maybe the project in the Project Question stemmed from a problem they saw in their own surroundings, or maybe the conflict they resolved in the Challenge Question was an issue they noticed in a group setting around them. The Community Question presents another opportunity for students to show that they are attuned to the problems in their surroundings.
A common example of a question that may be asked is for a student to think about what they may change about their high school career. This is a good opportunity for students to be reflective about things that went well and not so well in during their time in high school, and several students often take an opportunity to say that they would done certain academic things differently (for example, take different classes). While this is often a great answer (and shows that the student wants to challenge themselves or broaden their horizons), it might be helpful to think about the larger context of the interview and how well you are demonstrating that you pay attention the people around you. It is easier for an interviewer to argue that you do so if at least some of your answers across the whole interview reflect upon issues you noticed among your peers and the people in your community, even if you did not do anything to immediately fix such issues. It is unrealistic to expect any single student to have made deep, impactful changes in the way their school or community operates, but it is much easier to argue that they have the potential to do so if an interviewer can talk about how they accurately identified issues in the community in the first place.
With that, I shall conclude my guide here. I hope it is helpful to students interviewing currently, and I wish everyone the best of luck!! At the risk of being cliché, always remember that people often do well irrespective of where they end up going to college, and it is extremely important to not let your self-perception or confidence be affected by any single school’s choices.