Interview Prep, Start Now | With Alumni Interview Sign-Ups Opening at Top Schools in August, Three Icebreaker Techniques to Get Your Prep Right From the Start
The alumni interview sign-up windows for schools like Northwestern, Rice, and Dartmouth often quietly open in August or September, but most students don't start scrambling until they receive the interview invitation email. That time gap is exactly the window you can put to work. Two of the consultants on our team are themselves alumni interviewers: Ruoying has been a Penn alumni interviewer for years, and Justin covers both the Columbia and JHU interview networks. What they've observed most often isn't students failing to answer questions, but students making the interviewer uncomfortable in the first three minutes.
Here are three tested-and-effective icebreaker approaches to use depending on the situation:
When the interviewer emails you first to schedule, don't reply with only "Sounds good, I'm available." The right move is, before you confirm the time, to add one sentence expressing what you're looking forward to in the conversation and mention a specific direction you'd genuinely like to talk about. This puts you on the interviewer's radar before you even meet, rather than being the Nth name in their queue for the day.
When you meet, don't wait for the other person to break the ice. Proactively but naturally ask a question about their own experience at the school. Alumni interviewers usually take on this role out of a sense of affection for their school, and they enjoy being asked about their own story rather than being treated purely as an evaluator.
When asked "Why do you want to come to our school," avoid pulling the answer straight from your essay. An interview is a conversation, not a recitation. Answer with a specific reason tied directly to your own experience. Even something as simple as naming a specific course paired with "because I ran into this problem when I was working on X" is far more compelling than a vague "the academic environment is great."
What can an interview change? Sometimes nothing at all, and sometimes it's the extra gram that tips the scale between admitted and not.
If you have any questions towards college application, feel free to reach out to us, our consultants are more than happy to provide more insights to you!
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