Sunday, October 27, 2013

How to ace the college alumni interview

It's that time of year again -- the time for college applications.  For many competitive colleges and universities, the admissions process includes an "alumni interview."

These schools get applicants from all corners of the country and the world, and some get as many as 10 applicants for every spot in next fall's freshman class.
    
In today's world of the common application, as different as the essays and resumes may be, many of the applications tend to look the same. The alumni interview can give admissions officers "a face to an application and a story to the face."
  
The rates of acceptance are the same for candidates who have alumni interviews as they are for ones who didn't; nevertheless, Admissions Offices say they are helpful.
      
Generally speaking, an applicant will meet with one, two or perhaps three local alumni. When it's one on one, it might be in a public place, like a Panera or a Starbucks.
      
The process makes alumni feel involved and connected with their alma maters (and more inclined to pony up for the Alumni Fund). Alumni interviewers also get a charge out of meeting the young, vibrant applicants and hearing the exciting things they're doing and the great plans they have, which is a pretty good segue into the first two tips on how to ace the alumni interview:
  • Come prepared to tell about the exciting things you're doing and the great plans you have.
  • Give the interviewers a reason to write to the admissions office, "Of the dozen applicants we've interviewed, this is one of the outstanding candidates. He or she will contribute a), b), and c) to _________."
As in any interview, it's not so much "getting the right answer" but the way you answer that gives interviewers an idea of what makes you as a person special. Are you excited about your courses or marching band? Have your experiences meant something to you and developed you as a person? Do you have an agenda for your college years? "We want to know who the applicant is," said Dartmouth admissions officer Karen Sagall when she came through Knoxville some years ago.
Bring your resume -- including board scores, GPA, APs, and extracurriculars -- so the interviewers can have it in front of them. This way they don't have to ask your scores and grades, and they can see your activities and other items that interest them and ask you about them.
This will also help you if your mind happens to go blank, which happens to everyone from time to time.  (Some schools differ on this point.  Columbia, for example, wants interviewers to be unsullied by all that information.  They want interviewers to focus only on the person.)
Be ready to take the basic questions and tell your story:
  • Why do you want to go to ____? "Because it's a good school" is not the most persuasive answer. Give a reason that shows you know something about the school and how it fits into your plans. Hint: the alumni love their alma mater or they wouldn't be doing these interviews, so this is a good opportunity to talk about some things you know the school excels at (or claims to).
  • What do you want to do at ____? Show that you have an agenda, both in your academics and extracurriculars, want to rise to a challenging environment, and contribute to the college community. ("Leadership" is a big word these days in college admissions, the way "well-rounded" was in the 70s.)
  • Tell us about your activities. Rather than just list them (they're on the resume anyway) show some passion as you say what they mean to you and what they actually did in them. Try to avoid complaining about how badly you were treated or saying how you hated every minute of it. My group heard this twice last year. "Character" is another big word in college admissions these days.
  • Tell me about a book you read recently that meant something to you. Many of us draw a blank when we're asked this question in an interview. Think about this beforehand and try not to list the ones from the 9th grade reading list. There's no wrong answer: you can discuss The Autobiography of Kim Kardashian, just try to express some intelligent thoughts about it. Again, we're learning about who you are. Tip: it's OK to talk about The Hunger Games or Harry Potter, especially if you went to the bookstore at midnight for the release.
  • What were your favorite courses? Again, show some enthusiasm. We want to hear what you learned and how it has jazzed you up, because the whole idea is that you'll have the same experience with the incredible professors at ________.
  • What did you write your essay about? This should be a hanging curve you can knock out of the park. Presumably, applicants have put a great deal of effort into making their essays surprising and delightful expressions of their complete originality as human beings. We want to hear how you took a concept and treated it in an original way to make and original point. To quote a University of Chicago admissions officer, "It's about how you handle ideas." If your  parent actually wrote the essay, this question is more difficult.
  • Do you have any questions? This is where the interview draws to a close, and probably the only question you really want answered is, "Can I possibly get in?" (See the discussion below.) But as you're looking over the college materials, it doesn't hurt to think of a practical question or two that show you've done your homework. "What's the 'Jan Plan'?" "How do most people fulfill the language requirement?" "What is the 'sophomore summer term'?"  Though it feels like sucking up, it's certainly OK to ask your interviewers what they valued most about their college experiences. This will actually tell you a lot about the school. 

Final note: "Can I possibly get in?"  The accurate answer is that alumni interviewers can neither get kids in nor keep them out. If anything, alumni interviewers share the pain when someone they interviewed and highly recommended is "denied." But this is simply the reality of the numbers.

As mentioned earlier, the ratios of applicants to acceptances at many competitive colleges are beyond absurd. When an admissions office is picking one or two applicants out of 10, they have to "deny" thousands of fantastic students.  Generally those students end up at great colleges and have college careers that they wouldn't trade for anything. 

Given this reality, many alumni interviewers take the approach that the interview itself can be an educational opportunity for the applicants.  The applicants might learn something about the college, even if they never even visit there. They might also get something out of the exchange of ideas or the particular way that alumni describe their approach to learning and to the college experience.  In life, you simply never get enough practice at the art of being interviewed (and interviewing).

It is also a truism that, from time to time, an applicant will be interviewed by a jerk -- something that happens in life, to be sure.  Two of my college classmates chose my alma mater because their interviews with alums from another school went something like Tom Cruise's alumni interview in Risky Business.  Of course, Tom Cruise's character in the movie got in, so you never know about these things.

Many years ago, a friend called me because his son had applied to Yale and gotten a call about an alumni interview.  "What the heck is that?" he asked.  My answers to his questions became this blog post.  The son had a great interview. He did not get into Yale, which disappointed his interviewer, but he found the right college and had a great career there.  Ultimately, that's what it's all about.

Friday, September 27, 2013

You might be a grammarian.

With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy . . .

If, when you talk about "The Good Book," you mean the dictionary, you might be a grammarian.

If your car has a bumper sticker that reads "split atoms, not infinitives," you might be a grammarian.

If you write letters to your local newspaper about spelling errors in headlines, you may indeed be a grammarian.

If you've ever said the words aloud, "You can't be 'very unique,' something is either unique or not!" Then you are probably a grammarian.

If you find yourself editing shopping lists, you might be a grammarian.

If you stop your car on highways and curse grammatical errors on billboards, you might be a grammarian.

If you've ever taken out a Sharpie at a diner and crossed out those apostrophes around "Tips Welcome," you're probably a grammarian.

If you've ever corrected a letter from your company CEO in revisions mode and sent it back, then you might be a full-time grammarian.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Invigorate your prose -- find hidden verbs

From "A Plain English Handbook," put out by the Securities and Exchange Commission to encourage Wall Street denizens to make their stock and bond offerings halfway intelligible to the public:

Find Hidden Verbs
Does a sentence use any form of the verbs "to be," "to have," or another weak verb, with a noun that could be turned into a strong verb? In the sentences below, the strong verb lies hidden in a nominalization, a noun derived from a verb that usually ends in -tion. As you change nouns to verbs, your writing becomes more vigorous and less abstract.

before ................................ after
We made an application... . . . . . . We applied...
We made a determination... . . . . . We determined...
We will make a distribution... .. . . . We will distribute...

before
We will provide appropriate information to shareholders concerning ....

after
We will inform shareholders about ...


before
We will have no stock ownership of the company.

after
We will own no company stock.


before
There is the possibility of prior Board approval of these investments.

after
The Board might approve these investments in advance.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Growing Future Leaders: Why Western Parents Need to Adopt an Emerging-Market Mind-Set


By Susan Cramm       (from Strategy + Business)
I remember the lazy days of my childhood summers, languishing in the grass, bored but too tired to move after spending most of the day in the community pool. No summer school for me. When I applied to college, anything above a 3.2 grade point average gained automatic admittance to a University of California school. Nobody asked, or cared, about my (nonexistent) extracurricular activities. And, even amid a recession, I left graduate school with a good-paying job and little concern about security.
The world isn’t so simple now. Although many of us—especially those raised in the U.S.—grew up in a world full of choice, our children are growing up in a world full of competition. We can’t give our children our past, but we can help them create a future by adopting an emerging-market mind-set that creates choices by making them more competitive.
Read more.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Andrew Mason flails on the subjunctive

Erstwhile Groupon CEO Andrew Mason charmed employees by sending them a "genuine" letter announcing that he'd been fired and, like Evita, asking them not to cry for him.
      Mason may have TMIed (a new coinage?) when he revealed that he was hoping to go to a fat farm and lose 40 pounds, but the sadder revelation was that he, a Northwestern graduate, lacks a working command of the subjunctive mood.
     "I'm OK with having failed at this part of the journey,"Mason wrote. "If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through."

"Many writers don't know what that subjunctive case is, using 'was' when 'were' is correct," observes David Burns of Knoxville, who had University of Tennessee Professor John C. Hodges, author of the Harbrace College Handbook, for freshman English in 1950.
So, let's review:
       In the 1946 edition of the Harbrace, Hodges (right) wrote, "Only a few distinctive forms of the subjunctive remain," noting the top two --
  • Required Subjunctive -- chiefly in 'that' clauses of motions, resolutions, recommendations, order or demands." [e.g., "I demand that he see a physician.
  • Preferred or Optional Subjunctive -- especially in contrary-to-fact conditions and in expressions of doubts, wishes, or regrets. [e.g., "If the apple were ripe, it would be delicious."]
Hodges also made the distinction between formal and colloquial expression, giving four examples of colloquialisms we hear all the time, such as the one in the example above, "I wish that he was here."

More recent Harbraces state Rule 7d(2) as follows: The mood of a verb expresses the writer's attitude toward the factuality of what he or she is saying. The indicative mood makes statements--a definite attitude; the imperative mood issues commands or requests--an insistent attitude; and the subjunctive mood expresses situations that are hypothetical or conditional--a tentative attitude.

Indicative Dannice calls me every day.

Imperative Call me every day, Dannice

Subjunctive It is important that Dannice call me every day.