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The Definitive Guide to Acing Your College Interview

San — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:26:31 +0000

College interviews can be stressful to some students. But what you need to realize is that this is a relatively easy part of the college process. If you follow these few basic bits of advice, you can ace your interview and leave the stress at home.

DO:

Prepare by practicing with a friend or parent.
Get a good night’s sleep the night before – dozing off mid-interview may in fact count against you.
Be natural, be yourself.

DO NOT:

Over-prepare and psyche yourself out. One or two practice runs are plenty.
Arrive late.
Arrive too early. Showing up more than 5 minutes prior to the interview is considered bad form – especially if it is at the interviewer’s workplace, since it could interrupt her schedule and disrupt her work.

Commonly Asked Questions

Before the interview, you should prepare for some common questions that the interviewer may ask, such as:

Why do you want to attend this college?
What is your favorite/least favorite subject in school?
What is your favorite extracurricular activity?
What is your favorite book/author?
What do you want to do after college?
What is your biggest strength/weakness?
Who is your biggest role model?
What is your biggest achievement to date?
Tell me about an obstacle you’ve overcome.
Tell me about yourself.

You don’t have to memorize an entire answer for each question; just put some thought into each question and make sure you won’t be surprised or stumped by any of them.

Prepare Your Own Questions

Just as important as preparing for the interviewer’s questions is preparing your own. The right kinds of questions can not only leave a good impression, but also be informative for you. Take the opportunity to ask specific things about the school, such as your intended major, campus life, athletics, and study abroad opportunities. If you can engage in really substantive conversation on your particular interests, you can impress the interviewer with your passion and knowledge.

Dress Code

What to wear to interviews is a point of contention between some college advisors. But when it comes to dress codes, there is no one-size-fits-all rule (the pun was intended!). The key is adapting to your surroundings. If your interviewer wants to meet at his law firm, you absolutely should wear business attire. But if she wants to chat at the neighborhood coffee shop, you can probably dress more casually (guys – ditch the tie; girls – leave the pantsuit in the closet). There is definitely a lower limit when it comes to casual though – I would not recommend t-shirts, jeans, shorts, or tank tops in any situation.

One thing you can do to determine the right dress code is to do some research. If the interviewer asks to meet at his office, you should Google his company. Is it an old-school insurance company where everyone wears a suit and tie? Or is it a young startup internet company where someone in a suit would stick out like a sore thumb? Which brings us to the next point:

Research Your Interviewer

Athletes know the value of home field advantage. It isn’t just the thousands of fans cheering you and booing your opponent. When you are playing in a familiar environment, you are able to worry less about the little things and focus better on the game.

The point of researching the interviewer is not to creepily dig into his personal life, but gather some basic information and make yourself familiar with his background. A basic LinkedIn search will reveal these key pieces:

Picture
Graduating year (and approximate age)
Occupation
Company
Responsibilities at current job

Knowing these few things about your interviewer will give you a better sense of how to approach the interview. If her current occupation is of interest to you, it will provide useful conversation points.

After all, the interview has a dossier full of your background information – why shouldn’t you have the same?

Extra Credit

If you have a strong online presence, this is the perfect time to talk about it and send the interviewer off with a “leave-behind,” something he/she can look at afterwards. I strongly encourage business cards. If you leave the interviewer with a card containing your name and website/blog, she will most certainly take a look at it later. If you don’t have your own business cards, no problem – just write down the url on her card.
Thank-you notes after interviews are a definitely plus. Ask for an address where you can send the note, and send a brief, dead-simple note thanking the interviewer for her time. Email notes are okay, but paper is preferable, since it may end up in your application file.

In Summary: Style Points

Remember – interviews isn’t about answering questions correctly, or saying exactly what the interviewer wants you to say. In the end, they are more about style than substance. All the interviewer wants to see is someone who is curious, intelligent, personable, and can carry out a decent conversation. As long as you are comfortable during the interview and show genuine interest, you’ll come across well.

The Consensus on College Essays? Don’t be boring!

San — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:14:43 +0000

AdmissionsAdvice.com has published a blog post on college advice from actual college admissions officers. No surprises here if you’ve read our article on How to Write a Great College Essay, which emphasized setting yourself apart and letting your true personality emerge. Yale’s Director of Outreach and Recruitment put it this way:

“I’m interested in this person as a 17-year-old. The best essays are not the ones with perfect punctuation or that cool Ayn Rand quote that they think makes them sound like an intellectual, but ones that are honest and real because that’s how we get a sense of who the student is.”

He went on to talk about the importance of being consistent with the rest of the application and teacher recommendations. For example, with if a student write about the situation in Darfur:

“I would expect that that student’s teacher recommendations would talk about her concern for others, her leadership skills, or her passion for politics, and that her extracurriculars might highlight similar things. If the teachers don’t mention any of these things, and her only extracurricular is some minor club, the essay wouldn’t resonate with the rest of her application.”

He also warned against allowing your essay to get watered down through endless revisions by parents and tutors.

“Parents want to protect their children. They want to hold their hands and make sure that the child doesn’t fail…Sometimes, when I’m reading essays, I wonder who the real writers are because they don’t sound like a 17-year old wrote them.”

The lesson here? Colleges want to learn about you as a person, not as a savvy applicant. Write about what you think colleges want to read about, and you’ll be guaranteed to write a boring essay. As long as you write honestly on a topic you’re passionate about, you’ll be fine.

Barack Obama Says: Be Careful with your Facebook Profile

San — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:09:09 +0000

Even President Obama knows how important it is to be careful your online presence! As Reuters reports, the president said this during a question and answer session with 14- and 15- year old students:

“Well, let me give you some very practical tips. First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life.

And when you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff. And I’ve been hearing a lot about young people who — you know, they’re posting stuff on Facebook, and then suddenly they go apply for a job and somebody has done a search.”

POTUS is absolutely right: you should be careful with your online presence. But while the president emphasized things you shouldn’t post, he did not mention the things you SHOULD post to your online profiles, such as your academic achievements or your passions/interests.

Colleges are going to look at your profiles. A blank profile is preferable to an obscene one, but why not create a impressive profile?

Read the following article on establishing a stellar online presence through Facebook, Myspace, blogs, Twitter, etc:

What is Your Online Presence? Making Your College Application Stand Out

Good luck!

2010 Rankings for Best Colleges – US News and World Report

San — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:53:37 +0000

US News and World Report has released its 2010 list of best colleges.

Check out the rankings for national universities and liberal arts colleges.

As we always say, use these kinds of lists as a rough guide when looking at schools. Follow Regan’s advice – research thoroughly, visit the campuses, and find right fit for you.

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Online College Resource Roundup, August 09 – Virtual College Tours, First in the Family, NextStep

San — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:23:34 +0000

Add these to the wealth of online resources explored in Part 1 of Regan’s Final Countdown series and the list from AdmissionsAdvice:

Virtual College Tours – Campustours.com and Yourcampus360.com

Mark Montgomery from Great College Advice mentions two tools that allow you to visit campuses online, www.campustours.com and www.yourcampus360.com. These websites offer virtual tours, campus maps, and interviews with students.

Yes, we always say visiting the campus in person is the best way to get to know a college. But if you’re strapped for time, these tools are a great way to get a quick glimpse of a college before you decide to visit for real.

First in the Family

firstinthefamily.org is a website geared specifically towards first-generation college applicants. Besides useful tips and advice, it has a cool “Finding Inspiration” section with motivational quotations and book. It’s a very well-designed site with good content and a unique perspective. I hope to see improvements in the future, such as partnerships with first-generation-specific scholarship programs.

NextSTEP

NextStep considers itself a one-stop resource for life after high school. It features a wealth of articles on the college process and a pretty active discussion forum.

Using Your Personality To Get Into College

Regan — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:20:29 +0000

The Wall Street Journal has an interesitng article on personality tests and the college admissions process. Certain colleges, including BC and Tufts, have begun to use questions that reveal an applicant’s personality on their applications. It’s an interesting concept, but personality seems pretty hard to quantify.

Review of the College Board’s New Official SAT Study Guide – 2nd edition!

San — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:37:17 +0000

The College Board recently released the second edition to their Official SAT Study Guide, and it looks like a significant improvement on the original.

The main addition is the 10 new practice tests (2 more than the 1st edition), and more importantly, 3 recent exams. Those of us geezers who took the old SAT (the one scored out of 1600) will remember that the College Board used to publish 10 Real SATs, which was a precursor to the Official SAT Study Guide and featured 10 actual SAT tests from recent years. Those tests were extremely helpful, since you knew that the questions were actually used on an SAT.

When they changed the SAT format by adding a whole new section, the College Board didn’t have any old tests to publish. Instead they published “practice tests,” which were supposed to be similar to the actual ones. But they never carried the weight and value of actual exams.

I’m glad to see real exams making their way into print again, and I am looking forward to the next edition, which will hopefully contain even more real SATs.

If you don’t have the first edition already, this is a no-brainer. No other book carries actual SATs, nor do they have the cache of being “straight from the source.” Even if you have the 1st edition, but want more practice tests, you should definitely pick this one up. You’re getting 10 brand-new practice tests and 3 actual recent tests – more than worth the $13.

Buy the Official SAT Study Guide – 2nd edition (Amazon affiliate link)

Helpful Article on the College Process

Regan — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:26:29 +0000

Joie Jager-Hyman, a former admissions officer at Dartmouth, has an interesting article in Forbes about getting into Ivies and other competitive colleges.

Statistics 101: Determining Your Probability of Acceptance

Regan — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:18:58 +0000

In Part 1 of my Final Countdown series, I talked about how to make an initial list of colleges you’re interested in applying to. Now, of course, you should apply where you want to. But you also need a list of schools that have varying probabilities of accepting you. No matter how smart you are, applying to only Ivy League schools could easily end up in you not getting accepted everywhere. That said, you should also not just apply to schools you know you’ll get into; you should challenge yourself a bit.

Guidance counselors usually recommend that you apply to a combination of “safety schools” (schools to which you will probably be accepted), “target schools” (schools to which you have a decent chance, say 50%, of being accepted), and “reach schools” (schools to which you are statistically unlikely to gain acceptance).

I applied to fifteen schools; Amherst, Claremont McKenna, Colby, Dartmouth, Emory, Georgetown, Harvard, UMich, Princeton, Rice, SUNY Binghamton, Vanderbilt, Wesleyan, Williams and Yale. These schools have a variety of acceptance rates, so I’m hedging my bets that I will be accepted into at least one.

There is no set formula to determine which category (safety, target, reach) a school fits into. Generally, the lower the acceptance rate, the more likely the school is going to be a reach or target school. Obviously this is a general rule of thumb that will vary by applicant. There are useful tools for helping determine which category a school fits into. Naviance is internet based software that tracks every college application from your high school and allows you to see your statistics (GPA and test scores) graphed against past applicants from your high school. You can see who was accepted and rejected to each college, so it gives a relatively accurate picture of the general standards that college wants to see from your high school. Obviously colleges don’t admit students solely based on GPA and test scores, so Naviance doesn’t necessarily accurately predict your acceptance to colleges.

Mychances provides a free alternative to Naviance and offers many of the same features. After you sign up for a free account and enter some basic academic information (class rank, SAT scores, GPA, etc), it will assign you a “Selectivity Index.” You can then add colleges (most in the US are covered) to your profile, and it will tell you your chances of being accepted to these schools. A friend who used Mychances told me that it correctly predicted responses from 9 out of the 11 schools she applied to. Mychances is also useful in that it tells you what it’s accuracy has been in the past of predicting acceptances from each school.

How to Write a Great College Essay

Regan — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:54:51 +0000

The essay is one of the most dreaded portions of the college process. It requires a huge amount of time and effort, and can really influence where you get in. You can’t turn yourself into an amazing writer in a few months, so you should accept that your essay won’t be perfect. College admissions counselors aren’t looking for a perfect essay, they want writing that reveals more about you.

The common application essay is the most important essay, and the essay that you’ll send to the most schools, so I’ll focus on that. While there are a few prompts you can choose from, you can basically write about whatever you want.

What to write about

I would press for writing about something that you care about, and something that sets you apart from other candidates. You shouldn’t try to make yourself seem like the smartest, most empathetic or nicest applicant. Your goal for an essay should be to make sure that the admissions officers who read your essay remember it in a positive light. Your essay should, obviously, be as well written as possible, but also be about a pretty unusual topic.

A friend of mine wrote how he loves thinking and philosophizing while on the toilet, and what this reveals about him. Another friend of mine wrote about his favorite places in New York and why he cared about them. These were both well-written essays that revealed unique traits about the writers. That is exactly what college essays are supposed to accomplish.

If you need help, try the College Admissions Essays for Dummies. While I think this is less useful than many other books on the college process, it provides a lot of good prompts to help you think of potential essay topics. There are some free resources to help you brainstorm ideas. Like most things the College Board does, their advice on essays isn’t groundbreaking, but it might be helpful if you’re having trouble. Parke Muth, a dean in the admissions office at UVA has a good guide to writing college essays that helps you avoid common mistakes.

What not to write about

I would strongly recommend against writing about some community service you’ve done and how it’s affected you. Unless you have a phenomenal essay that goes way beyond how community service made you realize how fortunate you are, your essay will sound like hundreds of others that are written about the same topic.

What I wrote

I wrote about how reactions to my red hair in different countries that I traveled to shaped my perspective of myself. I’ll be honest; this isn’t a perfect essay. It’s kind of corny and I’m sure it could’ve been better written. However, it’s about a pretty unique topic and hence, it’s likely to stand out in the minds of admissions officers. I’d be willing to bet that very few admissions officers read more than one or two essays about having red hair this year. Here’s what I wrote:

I have red hair. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been referred to as redhead, ginger, “Carrot Top,” and “Ronald McDonald.” The name of just about any celebrity with red hair seemed to be an acceptable label for me. The source of my hair color remains a mystery; my mother was born in Cuba and my father in Texas, and neither have red hair. In elementary school the parents of my friends always referred to me as “that nice redhead boy.” No matter what I accomplished, I was still identified by the color and texture of my hair. As my hair grew longer and curlier, it reached the length where people found it appropriate to refer to it as a “jewfro.” When I first went to sleep away camp, my counselor—and soon after my whole cabin—referred to me as “brillo.” I was befuddled by the name until a friend explained to me that “brillo” was short for “brillo pad,” which was a coarse, wiry sponge—usually, unsurprisingly, a reddish brown color—used to scrape pots and pans. There seemed to be no avoiding my constant identification with my hair. This brought me a perpetual sense of insecurity. I feared that I always stuck out like a sore thumb.

This insecurity existed throughout my youth, and the encounters that perpetuated it occurred all over the world. My mother works for a web site dedicated to family travel, so we vacationed often and I had the opportunity to meet people of various cultures. Whether we were in Japan, Morocco, France, or Thailand, the one thing that most people we met had in common was the desire to comment on my hair. Some referred to it as strange and red, others described it as large and bright. It didn’t matter to whom we were talking or what language they spoke, fascination with my hair seemed to be transcend cultural or lingual barriers. In the summer of 2005, I visited my cousins in Istanbul. Towards the end of our trip we took a cruise around the city. Our boat had just passed the Topkapi Palace when one of the young men on the crew of the boat came up to me and pointed at my head and said “Napoleon Dynamite.” I was baffled for a second before realizing that he was referring to the recent film that chronicled the adventures of a quirky, nerdy redhead in a small Idaho town. Napoleon and I both have red hair, but aside from that, we have few things in common. While Napoleon lived in a small town, I live in a large city, and while Napoleon enjoyed drawing supernatural animals, my artistic talents are quite limited. My whole family laughed while I tried to laugh along and hide my embarrassment at the same time. I realized that I could travel halfway around the world, and yet the insecurity that my hair brought me would follow me every step of the way.

The moment that changed my perspective came towards the end of my sophomore year of high school. I was at my grandparents’ house when my grandfather screamed for me to come into the TV room. There was a news report on about redheads, and apparently my “species” was going to go extinct within the next century. Using statistical projections some scientists had estimated that the birth rate of redheads was declining, and that virtually no redheads would be born by 2100. Aside from my uncle making bad jokes about selling me to a research lab so they could do tests on me, the report changed my view. Every time I saw a young redhead child I would always think about the years of annoyance that child would have to endure. The report made me realize that there would be a time when there would be no more redheads. I had slowly been growing more accepting of my hair. I found redhead jokes slightly less annoying, and was even able to laugh at them once in a while. However, the news report really woke me up. I began to embrace my red hair. It became clear to me that we should all be proud of who are we are, even of our sometimes embarrassing aspects. I realized that even if people annoyed me about my hair sometimes, it is part of who I was and am, I shouldn’t be embarrassed by it, and I can’t change it. Well, that may not be true. I could’ve dyed my hair. But looking back, I’m glad I didn’t.