<p>Also, what is wrong with waiting in your car if you don’t want to drive around and browse in the town? Cars have heaters. Bring a book. Make some phone calls. I don’t know about you, but I spent YEARS waiting for my kids and killing time every afternoon, evening and weekend when they were growing up. An alum interview (if I had driven them…I admit my kid drove herself), would have been no different for me. And certainly the need to kill time is identical whether the interview is in a home or in a coffee shop. I don’t see that issue differing in this circumstance.</p>
<p>We have cell phones now. Speed dial.</p>
<p>Also, he could exit the house and run to the car. Couldn’t do that if I was driving around searching in vain for a cup of coffee, now, could he?</p>
<p>Sorry, SV, I’m not going back to repeat everything I’ve already written.</p>
<p>PG…you make a valid point that if one is worried about the in home interview and what could happen, that it might make sense to sit in the driveway and wait and make one’s presence known. </p>
<p>But speak about safety…how safe were you parked far away down the road hiding under blankets in the car? I mean if it was isolated, perhaps you were in danger of someone approaching you, a woman all alone on a dark road parked.</p>
<p>Cell phone would not help your kid here. My cell phone doesn’t work in my town. The kids who come here for an interview and have to call to have someone pick them up, use my home phone to do so. </p>
<p>Anyway, what does your kid do in college when mom is not two blocks away and the kid finds himself in an uncomfortable situation?</p>
<p>By the way, in my rural town, you would not be running around searching in vain for a cup of joe…anyone here in VT (which is where the applicants are from) KNOW that every country store in these villages sells coffee. General stores are where Vermonters congregate. :)</p>
<p>pg, my S would drive himself to his interview at 7:30 p.m. at Starbucks. As he did to his other public venue interviews.</p>
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<p>OK, the imaginations are definitely working overtime. Unless the interviewer introduces himself as Hannibal Lecter and offers you some chianti (and who, according to Wikipedia, went to Johns Hopkins, so there you go, no JHU in-home interviews!).</p>
<p>I am personally not afraid of being in or out of a car on a dark rural road.</p>
<p>SV asked the question,pg…I answered. You can accept the answer respectfully and move on. Or not.</p>
<p>But you’re uncomfortable driving around in the dark to find the nearest town center? You said a few posts ago that you wouldn’t want to risk it.</p>
<p>Every “village” I’ve lived in (including the one where I grew up) has had a coffee shop. Where you could sit and chew the fat with fellow residents. Nothing fancy, but a place to get a cup of coffee and come in from the cold (so to speak). </p>
<p>Risk <em>getting lost</em> pg. So I could return to pick him up on time, okey dokey?</p>
<p>Sorrowfully, I must bid you all adieu now!</p>
<p>Mummom, Interesting. Questionable manners to not have an interviewer(volunteer) not inivte you into the home but okay(not bad manners) to camp out uninvited in someone’s driveway! The interview is for your child , not you! Sense of entitlement is interesting. As others have said, if you feel the interview offer does not meet your needs, ask if there are alternatives.</p>
<p>Mea culpa to all the families I have inadvertently offended over the years with my interviewing. I never took into consideration the availability of coffee, the frequency of “fat chewing”, whether it would be dark or cold, or if in fact, my interview was causing undue anxiety. As I said- interviewing in my office would have required an expensive taxi ride out to a distant area filled with office parks and tech centers. Or would have assumed that a kid would have a car, or have access to a car, or would have a mom or dad available to sit in said car during the interview.</p>
<p>It just seemed more thoughtful to suggest my home (easy to get to from anywhere in the area on public transportation- cost about 85 cents back then except for high school kids who got subsidized ride cards so it would have cost them a dime each way). That way, kids who didn’t own a car wouldn’t feel that my college was only interested in kids who owned cars. That way, parents wouldn’t feel that my college was for country club swells who had nothing better to do than sit around driving their kids places. That way, I’d actually have time to answer the kids questions instead of interviewing in my office with the phone ringing and getting interrupted.</p>
<p>But clearly I was being selfish and wasn’t thinking about anyone but myself and my own need for power and control. Or that I was behaving inappropriately by not worrying that someone would think I was a sexual predator. Or that in fact, people wouldn’t want their kid going to my lame-o college which clearly hadn’t thought through the whole sexual predator business.</p>
<p>Again, parents get to decide where their kid goes and who they visit and under what circumstances. When an interviewer says, “I live in Brookline on Beacon Street do you want to meet at my house” is it so hard for the kid to say, “gee, is it possible for us to find a Starbucks close by?” if the house thing creeps you out? Why must every other kid in Boston be inconvenienced ?(Beacon Street has excellent public transportation links. It is often faster to take public transportation than to sit in traffic in your own car.) Why should you dictate that a system that has worked well for decades is no longer operative just because you think it’s inappropriate? We’re not talking about a society condoning slavery here… or some groupthink going on about a horrendous social evil. We’re talking about the possibility (and I’d love to see a documented case here… not just some ranting) that an interviewer who was assigned to your kid by the admissions office of a college that you’ve heard of, is in fact, a dangerous psychopath and could harm your kid during a 45 minute interview in his or her home.</p>
<p>If it scares you- then decline the interview or suggest a public place. But to put the onus on the interviewer because you don’t like it?</p>
<p>But back to my previously scheduled rant on why 22 year olds today have a strong and well-entrenched aura of entitlement which will harm them in the job market and seems to tie into the narcissism with which they were raised…</p>
<p>don’t go
daughter does not go to said ivy
easy enough</p>
<p>So maybe the College interviews at Starbucks aren’t so safe after all?.. <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/858579-strange-incident-starbucks-common.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/858579-strange-incident-starbucks-common.html</a></p>
<p>Blossom…as a volunteer alum interviewer, I appreciate your posts. I agree with everything you wrote (and you made me laugh). But truly, some thoughts on this thread make me realize how unappreciated our volunteering for these applicants seems to be (by some).</p>
<p>Jym, yeah, I’ve been maintaining that the belief that your kid is safer if you meet at an office or Starbucks more than a private home is not necessarily true. If you are worried about evil alumni interviewers (I happen to think the risk is next to nothing), the concern should be no matter where the meeting takes place. Bad things can happen anywhere.</p>
<p>mummom, as I wrote…there are LOTS of places to get coffee in my town. We have little general stores. That is where MOST get their coffee (I bet my husband stops there every morning) and people chat (there is no place to sit). General stores are typical in every small Vermont town. Those who come to the interview are Vermonters and know this. To get to my house, they have to drive through the village and in the center of the village is a little general store (with gas) and it is part of the directions to my home that I give them to turn there. There are three turns to get to my house. Most would drop off their kid and easily find their way back into the village center. Most would wander around the shops if it were daytime though they all close by 6 PM the latest. There is one cafe type place for coffee (not a chain) but it closes at 5:30 PM. The market is open later than that. Otherwise there are restaurants and bars. I’m sure a parent could go into a restaurant that has a bar and order coffee there as well. I don’t know how small the villages are that you are familiar with but this is kinda small here. We don’t even have a traffic light in our entire town. But I do live in a resort town and so there are places to go out to dinner here…many. I would not meet a student at these places as it would be too costly to meet and I would not meet them in the bar area. A parent could go into the bar area of the restaurant and have coffee or a soda I bet. But truthfully the general stores are the places where Vermonters “chew the fat.”</p>
<p>Once again, Blossom makes some very valid points, right down the entitlement of some children based on the narcissism of their parents.</p>
<p>Honestly… I am of the opinion that Mummom just likes to drive her opinions like bamboo shoots under fingernails. In reading so many of her posts, I find there is little to no appreciation for an alternative viewpoint as she is always right and everyone else is simply ignorant (or worse) if they don’t share her world view. There seems to be very few shades of gray and absolutely no compromise. I do not understand why it is so hard to buy into the theory that if a kid is uncomfortable he can ask for a change of venue. I think some of the concerns voiced here have given some others things to consider, but the truth is, beyond inconvenience of some kind, again… not one poster has ever had a true issue with an in-home interview. So why must there be an insistence that you are absolutely right in your opinion with such a disregard for more than 50 pages of varying views? </p>
<p>So I was thinking that it must have something to do with being validated… or not as the case may be. </p>
<p>No one has said there aren’t valid reasons to be aware. But there are good points to be found in an in-home interview and just because you don’t agree with them, doesn’t mean anyone has to jump on your particular bandwagon.</p>
<p>I believe there can be varying points of view and MOST posters seem to embrace the depth and breadth of experience that other’s provide. I just wonder what is this incessant need to condemn every one else’s personal experience and opinion? There are plenty of things that are out of your control in this world. Allowing your kid to meet an alum for an interview isnt one of them. Do what is right for your family, but please stop insisting that if our fears or concerns aren’t yours in the least that we’re wrong or worse.</p>
<p>As for me, I’ve grown increasingly weary of the self-righteousness and really, I am a very, very tolerant person of other people’s “issues” and why they might be. But seriously, I find your opinions to be extremely inflexible on several fronts and I think this is why you seem to put out hostile vibes, which are then returned. It just seems so very insecure.</p>
<p>As a parent, I admit that when I came upon this thread, I found it unfathomable that people were concerned for their kids’ safety at a college interview with an alum interviewer. I just found it hard to imagine. This is in particular as I am a parent who worries. But if you don’t want your kid to have to have a college interview in a home, or feel you must park two blocks away in case he faces danger in what most consider a situation that is NOT dangerous (I haven’t heard of a bad incident ever), what do you honestly do when they go to college and find themselves mixing with strangers on campus and off and you can’t be parked two blocks away? They are in far riskier situations. I mean I have trouble worrying about my kids too and so I understand. But at some level we can’t be there for all these times. At some point, they have to do these things that are not overly risky on their own and know how to handle themselves in case trouble arises. We can’t shield our kids from everything. I worry lots. But I never imagined worrying about the college interview of all things.</p>
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<p>As the parent of a 25 year old grad student in a university 3000 miles away, boy do I long for the days when I could drive her to the home of a college interviewer, sit in the car and wait, and then be there to hear about it afterwards. 7 short months after our interview season, said daughter was on the east coast living her life in a very urban and not so safe city, meeting all kinds of people, partying, staying out late, studying even later, doing what all college kids do when they are away from home for the first time.
I’m sure I never heard about some of activities that would have made me worry, and there were plenty I did hear about. I remember asking, do you have to walk home after dark from the library by yourself? Do you have to go running by yourself through that neighborhood? Do you really need to go up to New Hampshire, or down to Pennsylvania, with your friends (whom I’ve never met, of course) to campaign for your candidate of choice?<br>
As parents, there are so many real things to worry about. I’m thinking that maybe the concern over the interviewers that some parents have may just be there own sub-concious kicking in-- they must realize at some level that these protected times are just about over for our kids. In a heartbeat, they’ll be gone, on their own, and perhaps, like my kid, will never return to live at home again, except for the brief holiday or summer visits. Maybe the concern isn’t really over the interview, but really about the deeper fear that they’re losing the control over their kids’ lives that they once had, and they know it, and it’s just coming out in this way.
It’s hard to let them go. It really is. I do sympathize.</p>