How to define a glowing/horrible interview

jaimeleschevaux
Fri, 04 Feb 2011 15:51:33 +0000

I define the interview partially by how the applicant feels about the college after the interviewer.

For Princeton, my interviewer was extremely late (while I got to wait in literally freezing rain, at one point starting to fear for my safety). Once the interviewer arrived, it turned out that this person had scheduled the interviews back to back and had only ten minutes before needing to go to the next interview. The interviewer then spent some time talking about Princeton vaguely AND THEN TALKED ABOUT HOW GREAT ANOTHER PEER COLLEGE WAS. My mouth nearly fell open in surprise. Two minutes of talking about my extracurriculars (which need intense explanation) and then I got cut off, the interviewer saying that he/she would give me a great review and that he/she had to go to the next interview.

I qualify this as a disastrous interview because after speaking with this interviewer, I am no longer interested in Princeton. Leaving a single female high school student in the freezing dark rain and then only giving me ten minutes was exceedingly arrogant and rude.

My Harvard interview, on the other hand, was incredible. It lasted far longer than the 10 minutes I got with Princeton (an hour and 20 minutes, to be precise) and gave me an on-cloud-nine feeling for like, a week. I was on the fence with both Harvard and Princeton, and now Harvard is my first choice and Princeton has plummeted on my list.