A question about interviews

[LTee]

As far as interviews go, I know they are the last stage in the application process. I was wondering, how many of you have had interviews and then gotten or not gotten in to the school? Do you suppose they generally accept most who make it to the interview process unless that individual has really poor interpersonal skills and/or lack of knowledge about the program (the obvious things that would make an interview not go well.)

[fuzzylogician]

As far as interviews go, I know they are the last stage in the application process. I was wondering, how many of you have had interviews and then gotten or not gotten in to the school? Do you suppose they generally accept most who make it to the interview process unless that individual has really poor interpersonal skills and/or lack of knowledge about the program (the obvious things that would make an interview not go well.)

I would assume this changes from discipline to discipline and possibly even from department to department. I can only tell you my stats and you can make of them what you will:

I applied to a total of 8 departments. I was accepted to 5 without being contacted by faculty members before the decision was made (in my field it's not customary to contact profs before applying) - I did email and talk on the phone with at least one faculty member from each department after I was notified of the decision and eventually visited 4 of those places. As it turned out, the places that did not ask for an interview were in fact the places where I thought I was a better fit. The remaining 3 schools were more of a backup and less obviously a good fit for me--and they were the ones that wanted to interview me before making a decision. I talked on the phone with 1-2 faculty members at each school, but since I already had the acceptances from the other schools I withdrew my application so they would accept someone who'd actually go there. My guess would be that out of those three schools, one would have accepted me for sure, the other ones could have gone either way. It felt like they were feeling me out and would have soon after made a decision, not that they had a bunch of people to interview and only a few would eventually be selected and offered admission.

It strikes me though that the interviewers were not looking to judge my knowledge of the program--that actually never came up in any of the interviews; or my interpersonal skills--maybe it's because I'm foreign and most of the interviewers were also foreign, and conference calls are a bad way to conduct such interviews, but "<silence> uh, I am sorry, could you repeat that sentence" was uttered repeatedly and did not seem to do disturb anyone. I should maybe point out that the interviewers were always all of my potential advisers in each department--my field is small enough that there are not more that 2, max 3, profs in my subfield in a given department. What I felt they were trying to gauge was exactly how I would fit in the department - what my interests were, what theories I would want to employ to investigate these interests, and whether the school had the resources to allow me to do my proposed studies.

It's very much about giving your routine spiel--you learn to have one sentence-, two sentence-, five minute-, etc. versions of this that you give in different settings throughout the application process--that basically goes like "this is me and this is why I should be at your school", but slightly modified to accommodate each department. If you want to really sell yourself you have to know the department and its resources and make reference to them when you're presenting yourself (if you ever go on visits to schools you'll do this same spiel anywhere from 5 to 15 times a day..). It starts with introductory emails and your SOP but it get repeated later on in the process, if you get past the initial cutoff stage. So if that's what you mean by having knowledge about the program, then that's definitely something they look for in an interview, but not in the sense that you necessarily have to remember the course names and how many credits you take each semester.

I am sure my personality also came through; I definitely asked in each interview questions about the department's personality - the atmosphere, student-student and student-professor collaborations and such like, but that mostly came from my side, not from the interviewers. I think the shortest interview I had was about 40 minutes, and these issues only came up at the very end, maybe in the last 10 minutes or so. So I would say that wasn't the main thing they were interested in finding out, at least not in a direct way.

Well. This turned out longer than I anticipated. Hope it helps.