<p>don’t worry about it too much. It sounds like the grad student who interviewed you felt bad that his joke didn’t go over well.</p>
<p>College interviews are not tests designed to see if you fail; they are a chance for the interviewer to get to know you. Anybody who has worked on a hiring team before (me! more than a few times, in various situations) knows that it’s often the little things that make an applicant stand out. For example, I was part of a team interviewing for a position that had almost nothing to do with academic prowess, and yet it came up during the interview that the applicant was taking Turkish classes for fun While her Turkish skills would have no use for the job she was applying for, we decided that we liked the kind of person who would be as risk-taking and playful as she was, to take up a relatively obscure language for fun. I think we would have thought similarly of an applicant who likes to participate in marathons or an applicant who invests a lot of time into community service.</p>