Interview Geography ? for DanAdmiss

Seashore
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:54:35 +0000

Hi momof3sons. It looks like Dan’s been and gone and didn’t see your post. So I thought I’d take a stab at it. My guess is that your son/daughter was assigned an interviewer in an inconvenient location?

The interview committees are geographic, and students are assigned to a committee based on the location of their high school (it’s generally hard to have boarding school kids interview from home). But the committee chair has both the school and home address. It depends on the committee, but I think that most chairs do what they can to assign interviewers who are either near the high school OR near the home (except for those boarders, of course).

Some of the committees cover a very large geographic area, and the geographic distribution of the interviewers doesn’t always mesh very well with the geographic distribution of the applicants. We do the best we can, but there are plenty of mis-matches. And plenty of kids who would like interviews but don’t manage to have one.

If an applicant is unhappy with the location of the interview, there’s no reason why he/she couldn’t contact either the regional committee chair or the admissions office to see if there’s an alternate interviewer or whether even the committee assignment could be changed.

And if nothing works and your S/D doesn’t have an interview, it’s fine to talk on the phone or write a note saying what he or she had especially wanted to convey in the interview.

I know this statement doesn’t always help in the overly tense application process, but please remember that a great many students are admitted to Tufts without interviews. The interviews are a good way for some students to help bring their applications to life, but for most everyone, there is plenty of information in the transcript, test scores, recommendations, and essays.