Bright college days

[rivka]

An admissions counselor for Reed College contacted me the other day. Would I be kind enough to interview a couple of prospective students in my area, and tell them about Reed? Their normal mid-Atlantic states rep had to cancel her trip to Maryland because of health problems, and... and...

Sure, I said. Why not? And so I've been trading e-mail with a nervous, carefully polite high school senior from the Eastern Shore, setting up an appointment at a Borders cafe. After which I'll write a letter to Reed, telling them what I think about his suitability for admission.

I worked for the admissions office my senior year, and I interviewed a lot of high school seniors then. (And juniors. And junior college students. And homeschooled kids.) My first year at Iowa I think I interviewed two kids there. I've done the admissions thing fairly recently myself, of course - the whole round of internship interviews in the winter of '99. But those were much more like high-pressure half-day job interviews. In college admissions, all you have to do is convince the interviewer that you're an interesting person. You don't have to have firm career goals and a therapeutic orientation.

I'm out of practice at this. I remember that a big part of the interview is talking about Reed - what it's like to be a student there, what the possibilities are, how this kid would fit into the picture. I remember the convention that you don't mention other colleges by name, although you can do generic comparisons - I had a whole spiel about why you might choose Reed over Large State University. I remember fielding questions from parents about drugs, and nose piercings, and why the tuition was so high.

I remember that I used to have a good repertoire of questions to ask. I think my routine opener was "So, what got you interested in Reed?", but I don't remember what I used to ask next. Hey, LiveJournal world: what would you ask a nervous 17 year old to help them reveal their inner coolness? What would you want to be asked, that would let your coolness unfold?

Comments

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Caveat: at English universities, you have to apply for a subject-specific course, so this may be harder to translate to the US system. But I know from talking to tutors at my first university that the single most important thing they were looking for was a spark of enthusiasm for the subject the applicant was intending to study - talking about it should make their face light up. Next most important was an absence of dogmatism and willingness to consider other points of view - for my theology interview, they went to some trouble to make sure I wasn't a Biblical literalist, for instance.