What kinds of questions should a college interviewer ask a high school student?
I've just been assigned a high school senior to interview for my alma mater, Yale. How can I put her at ease and get a better sense of the kind of person she is?
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I was asked to answer the question above on the website Quora.com
Let me start by saying I have never done an alumni interview so what I will say here should be taken for what it is, my opinion based on what I know from having interviewed thousands of students from around the world over several decades in my role as an admission dean and now in my roll as a consultant.
It is already a good sign that you want to put the student at ease. If you can do this from the outset the rest will be enjoyable for you and for the student too.
The first thing to think about is the venue. I find that a neutral place, like a coffee shop, helps the student relax. I know some who have students come into office buildings or some other more formal setting and this makes the student think, “This is official and it’s important and so is the person talking to me.” Giving them a place where you don’t have too many trappings of power or prestige can lower the stress level of the student. [1]
It also helps if you are relaxed. You should be. While alumni interviews can help or hurt a student a little bit in the admission process, most interviews do not have much effect on the decision. A New York Times reporter wrote a great article about being an interviewer a while back but it still holds true.
Over the last decade, I’ve done perhaps 40 of these interviews, which are conducted by alumni across the country. They’re my only remaining link to my alma mater; I’ve never been back to a reunion or a football game, and my total donations since graduating in the 1970s do not add up to four figures.
No matter how glowing my recommendations, in all this time only one kid, a girl, got in, many years back. I do not tell this to the eager, well-groomed seniors who settle onto the couch in our den. They’re under too much pressure already. Better than anyone, they know the odds, particularly for a kid from a New York suburb.
By the time I meet them, they’re pros at working the system. Some have Googled me because they think knowing about me will improve their odds. After the interview, many send handwritten thank-you notes saying how much they enjoyed meeting me. The New York Times [2]
Most of the students you will interview are great, but almost all of them won't get in. You are there to make the person comfortable, to find about some things, and then answer questions. In part ,the person you are is important in several ways. The image you present will come to stand for Yale, so should the student get an offer, your conversation will actually play a larger role than what you give in terms of feedback to the admission office about the viability of the candidate.
It doesn’t take long, at least in my experience, to know if the person you are talking to is really nervous or has her wits about her. Almost all the students I have talked to (for an exception see the footnote below) have been far more genial, talkative and articulate than I was at that age. I think that the role parents now play in the whole college process (and in their children's lives overall) may have something to do with this. Many students are not at odds with their parents the way it was back when I was 17. Parents now are far more often allies and sometimes even serve as BFFs (not something I necessarily think is always good, but this new phenomenon was written about recently:
"I think it's a fairly new development that you hear women saying, 'My daughter's my best friend, my mother's my best friend,'" she says. "I think that would have been unheard of years ago and is probably still pretty unheard of in most cultures of the world." Why daughters fight with their mothers: A Georgetown linguist explains
You should expect that the person showing up will be ready to answer whatever you ask. I have already written about interviews, except from the student perspective. One of the things on this post is a list of questions that alumni interviewers typically ask and this might help you too.
SAMPLE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
* What has been your favorite course during high school? Why? What characteristics do you seek in your teachers?
* How would you rate your academic strengths and weaknesses? Are you better in some areas than others? Do you know why?
* Which subjects are you studying now? Do you enjoy some more than others? Why? Are your courses easy or challenging?
* If I were to wander into your school's faculty room and mention your name, what reaction would I get? How would your teachers characterize you? Do some teachers see you differently than others?
* How would you rate yourself as a writer? What was the most challenging writing assignment you've faced?
* What subjects do you plan to study in college? Are there any new subjects you hope to try? Do you have any dreams or goals after graduation from college?
* Are there any specific extracurricular interests or activities that you plan or hope to pursue in college?
* Why are these of interest?
* What have you done in these areas before? Have you participated during high school or in your community?
* What do you gain from this interest?
* Are you a different or better person because of the time you've committed to this interest?
* What have you done during the summers? Is there someone you share a special interest with? Is there someone in your life who has had an impact on your life and why?
* If the student has worked at a job: How did you get the job? Did you enjoy it? What were the best/worst features of your job? Did you learn anything about yourself in this job? Would you do it again?
* What might you do with a year off between high school and college?
* Tell me about your current schedule and activities.
* Why do you want to go to Wesleyan?
* What subject areas are you most interested in? Discuss a book or project that you enjoyed.
* Have you thought about a major or area of concentration? Ideas about your future?
* What do you look forward to most about college?
* How well do you do with independence? Give an example of a problem or task or project you have dealt with that required you to demonstrate your independence.
* Any questions for me?
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On the other hand, if you want to make the interview something that could turn into a learning experience for both of you, then you might jettison the typical questions. I don’t mean to suggest that you should do a shock and awe attack or anything of the sort, but I do think that there are ways of making interviews substantive and useful, if not for an admission decision, than at least for your own edification.
It isn't often people are in a position to ask virtually any question to someone who is smart, motivated and has some experiences that are worth hearing about. This is the way I approach interviews, but I know that what I do is outside the mainstream. I can say that I feel that I have ended up learning more about schools, the current cultural and psychological frame of high school students and much more from approaching the interview in a non-traditional way.
If all this sounds mysterious it isn’t. My interviews start out with the quick hello/intros, handshake, the offer to buy coffee, and then a couple of softball questions. These tend to center around the school the student attends or the typical "tell me a bit about yourself". If I sense they are relaxed and articulate then I might shift the speed up some ((if a person is very nervous I just make it as easy on them as I can be) with some questions like “Are you smart?” That question usually elicits some answers that open the door to see how they perceive themselves. I ask a number of other more or less personality type questions (Are you your own best friend or own worst enemy") and I always ask about stress within the school and how much stress they put on themselves (or how much parents put on them)—these days students trying to get into schools like Yale have all earned masters degrees in stress. Most like the topic. Finding out how much pressure is on high achieving students is worth hearing about as a lot of people, in and out of education, see at least some portion of the high achieving kids as one writer puts it "entitled little shits". [3] Then I try to get on the topic of academic interests. If I can, at any point, see the body language change and the student begins to show some passion for something then that is where we will stay for a while.
A good interview mostly depends on being able to listen to specific details and then to follow up with questions that permit a student to share what it is that makes them them. If you hit that vein you will find if not gold than rare ore of some sort. Others would call it soul. It could be astrophysics (I had an hour and half conversation recently with a student on the topic of dark matter), or it could be art (I had a student who has already raised money for an art start up that will bridge markets in New York Paris and China) or it could be talking about a summer football camp in which the coach was like Joshua Chamberlain and the kids were a band of brothers (read Mark Edmondson’s "Why football Matters" if you think football doesn’t matter). I guess what I am trying to say is the more you can get them to share details, the individual things they say and do and joke about the more human the conversation. The barnacles of cliché get swept away and the swift ship of arête (greek word meaning excellence) takes both of you away from the linguistic islands of cliché (Circe) and outward into unchartered territory. I’m making this trope poetic as that is one thing I like to play with and if I had a chance to talk about this when I was in high school I might have surfaced from the depths of aloof cool and said something interesting.
Given the little I know about you, my guess is that you will be a great interviewer. Quora, after all, has helped any of us who spend a fair of time on the site, learn about questions and answers. I hope you talk for far longer than you thought you would and that the experience will encourage you to do more interviews. I tell people I could not have paid for the education I have received from students and much of what I have learned has come about through some of these interviews.
[1] I used to think that my academic office was a great space, lots of books, objects from many places around the globe, and some art. But we had to go through some closed door that said “Private” and made it a bit of visit to the Wizard of Oz. One poor student was sitting across from in in a university embossed chair grabbing the sides of his chair so that I thought he might actually define White knuckling it. What happened next is something I doubt he will forget. His right foot wasdoing a see saw movement and then suddenly his shoe came off and nearly beaned me. After that, I decided to take anyone I was interviewing to a coffee shop.
[2] While the article is a number of years old, Michael Winerip, the author, wrote me a few weeks ago when I contacted him about it (for something else I was writng about) that he still gets a lot of people writing him about how useful this piece was not just in placing the importance of interviews in a useful context but also for putting the whole selective admission process in a way that let’s us think about the bigger picture.
[3] I have written a number of times about the author who uses this phrase , including as part of a profile of a student who left the author if not quite at a loss for words, at least unable to answer a simple question about his use of this term: "Near the end of the just ended semester I attended a lecture by William Deresiewicz, the author of the viral article (and book) that calls students who attend Ivy leagues schools and schools like Jenni’s too “excellent sheep”. He also calls them “entitled little shits”. He has had a lot of people who agree with him in the media and in education too. I have written a lot about him and his words before so I won’t repeat my critiques. Instead, I will tell a story
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