PICK AND CHOOSE

Do admissions interviews matter?

Start with eye contact, a firm handshake and a smile. “Hi, I’m Abigail Malis. I’m a senior here, and I’ll be doing your interview today.” Those thirty minutes, and the time I spent writing about them afterwards, were the most important aspects of my job this summer as a Fellow in Carleton’s Admissions Office. Over the course of 2 ½ months, two other students and I completed just under 300 interviews.

The college interview: At Carleton they’re not required and, in fact, more students interview off campus with alumni admissions representatives than come out to our admissions office. And, since not every applicant does an interview, the interview cannot play an essential role in the admissions committee’s decision. Most of our applicants don’t know this, though. A number of the students we interview come into it believing that their performance in the interview will make or break Carleton’s decision. To ease the students' minds, we remind them the interview is to be purely informational, “to paint a three dimensional picture for the admissions committee.”

Thus, we don’t ask about grades or test scores, and we will never ask which person in history you’d want to have lunch with, your favorite ice cream flavor, the cartoon character you most identify with or your definition of success. I interviewed students who had been asked all of those questions and always found myself wondering how fun ice breakers actually were in a room of two people with one person taking notes on your answer… (I’d say I’d be Nemo from Finding Nemo, but wait, does she get lost easily? Call boats butts? Disobey my parents? Clown around all of the time?)

Despite the fact that the interview is not evaluative and does not play a decisive role in the admissions process, we are still expected to get a sense of the applicant and, more importantly, give our input as to whether or not we could see that student at Carleton. How is it possible that, for the most part, we were able to get a sense of the students we interviewed so quickly? We were complete strangers to the students we interviewed, and they were strangers to us. Yet, we were expected to get to know them in a time not exceeding the hour slot for our interview. We learned quickly that the key to a good interview is asking the right questions. Our basic questions center on high school including favorite classes, current schedules, and extracurricular activities. We learn a lot about the students we interview through both what they say in their answers and how they answer.

With more interview experience came greater understanding of the bigger meaning behind the answers to these questions. Being a stranger to the Midwest public school system, I quickly learned that band could mean marching band or just band, the difference between AP and IB, and that debate meant a lot of research, came in many varieties and was occasionally referred to as forensics (I seriously thought some of the students I interviewed were training to be the next CSI detectives). Beyond that, their questions had meanings as well: anything about the social scene signified either interest in drinking and drugs or fear of them, mentioning of standardized test scores meant they didn’t really reflect the student’s grades, and even a question like "What would you want to change about Carleton?" showed that they had been doing college interviews, and someone was training them on what to ask.

In short, those interviews gave the applicant something most applications lack almost entirely: passion. Every student who did community service through National Honor Society looks roughly the same on paper, but the one who got to explain, in person, how a certain project affected him/her really stands out. That football player with good grades is certainly a great applicant, but he’s even more interesting when he reveals in his interview that he loves sculpture and always carries around a small piece of clay to sculpt wherever he may be.

As Fellows we were trained to find those quirks, those hidden talents, and, most importantly, that passion for learning, for life or for a specific subject. To do this we had to be police detectives, psychologists or journalists, sensing that part in a conversation where you just know there is something that has been left unsaid. For that football player, it was the longing in his voice when he mentioned the appeal of a liberal art school where he could take things like English, art and science, all while playing football. By pushing the topic a little further, I discovered his passion for art something I’m not sure would have ever come through in his Common Application.

A successful interview was one where we were able to discover that hidden or not-so-hidden passion—and we were trained to do it in less than an hour. In fact, I had a number of interviews where I had gotten a complete sense of the applicant in the first 15 minutes. This is no reflection on the quality of the applicant; it just meant that he or she was really efficient at answering the questions I asked. Once, I learned a whole interview’s worth of information from an applicant’s answer to the question "What have you been up to this summer?"

This was not always possible, and it would be wrong to paint a picture of the interview process at Carleton as one without its glitches and occasionally awkward situations. Sometimes an interview went poorly because of a student’s bad attitude, other times it was simply the fault of a student’s circumstance: being forced to look at Carleton by parents, never having done a college interview before, etc. And, of course, there are times that we as Fellows are not as composed as we would like. I will never forget one stressful day when I babbled on about building IKEA furniture with a student I was interviewing when he mentioned that he liked to find his own way of doing things instead of following the norm. While I still thought he would fit in well at Carleton, I’m not sure that he got the best first impression of Carleton through me. And, while an interview wouldn’t make or break Carleton’s decision to accept him, it will probably make or break his decision to accept Carleton.

I still find myself thinking about the whole admissions process as a way for a group of strangers to select 500-some strangers to make up the Carleton community. When it comes down to decision time, when all of the applicants that made it to the final round look exactly the same on paper, it is not usually about what personalities would get along best, but what the class ‘needs’ to be well rounded: a certain amount of athletes, potential science majors, musicians to complete the band, etc. In some ways it is shocking that things tend to work out as well as they do. But, in the end, I do believe that the Admissions office at Carleton tries to take the stranger out of the process as much as possible. After all, many other schools in the country do not host applicants overnight, let them sit in on classes or have interviews with them. And, for the most part, I think that we did get a true sense of the students that we interviewed—most were qualified, many were impressive and a surprising amount were students we could see doing amazing things at Carleton. The admissions committee definitely has their work cut out for them.