<p>So my EC interview is coming up in a couple of days…</p>
<p>I’m constantly rethinking whether or not I will take a portfolio. If I do, it would be very brief.</p>
<p>Here is the disadvantage of taking a portfolio:
-boring my EC. I know the interview is designed so that the Institute can get to know the “person” in me, and see more than numbers and papers (beyond the application), and so a portfolio would undermine this purpose.</p>
<p>And what I think may be an advantage:
-If I take some hard copies of my major work (research, newsletters I write), then this may be a plus in letting the EC get to know me even more? Maybe we can even talk about some of my stuff…</p>
<p>Any more advantages/disadvantages/personal experiences with the matter/opinions? </p>
<p>I think it’s a great idea to take a folder of visual aids – not, for example, a research abstract, but a few selected images or drawings from your research. Then if you happen to be discussing your research, or one of your activities (like making the newsletter), you can pull out the relevant picture and show it. </p>
<p>Keep in mind that you may or may not have the opportunity to use your folder, depending on how the discussion goes. But you can have it there just in case it’s useful in the course of the interview.</p>
<p>I like the idea of a “folder of visual aids” better than a portfolio. I’ll have in there likely-to-be-relevant pics, research work, and other major projects.</p>
<p>Yes, I have had interviews over the years where students have had a clear vision of how the interview will go in advance (“… And then I will steer him on to this topic, and then I will ensure that I bring up this, and then we pull out the audio visual aids, and voila, there is no room for any messily unscripted bits”). They tend not to work. </p>
<p>Keep in mind that the function of the interview is to allow us to look for things that will not appear elsewhere on the application, in your words “so that the Institute can get to know the “person” in me” and most of what you are proposing doesn’t meet that need. Frankly, I have been shown research papers before, almost always in fields in which I am no expert, so what am I to do. Read a paper that I cannot understand or evaluate, or simply note its existence. And I would presume that its existence would be something that would appear elsewhere on the application. If an applicant brought such a paper, I would probably feign mild interest, and then ask questions that I was much more interested in like “What did you find the hardest part of putting together the research paper?” and other questions that were much more about process, motivation, drive, etc. And I rarely need the physical paper in order to ask such questions.</p>
<p>By all means, bring it along. It cannot really hurt. But do not expect to be able to pull your EC through an academic presentation and have them impressed and amazed. That isn’t really what the interview is for. That being said. I like pictures. If you have done something that comes across really well in a picture, I am happy to look.</p>
<p>The interview was actually today (couple of hours before you posted). I showed the EC some parts of my portfolio/folder of visual aids. One of the things he presented interest in was my research work (which was a part of the folder). By the end, I had explained just about the entire project, including my professor/mentor’s prior work, our work, our planned next steps, my influential role in these next steps, our collaboration with another lab and the role of their results in our analysis, etc. I wasn’t originally planning on saying all this, but my EC sort of gave way to it. And actually, this research is all biology related…my EC studied civil engineering.</p>
<p>So, like you sort of said, things vary. For those reading this thread for guidance, I guess it cannot hurt to take materials pertaining to your major work–like your research, for example–but be careful so not to inappropriately go into too much detail.</p>