Interview Season Starts Earlier Than Most Students Expect
If you have submitted or are about to submit an Early Decision or Early Action application to a school that offers alumni interviews, the interview request can land in your inbox within days of submission, not months later. Schools including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, and Williams all run some form of interview program for a meaningful share of applicants, and for early-round applicants specifically, that means interviews are typically scheduled and completed between mid-October and mid-December, before the decision is even made. Waiting until you have an interview scheduled to think about what might be asked leaves you with far less runway than the essay-writing process gave you.
It matters who is asking. Almost none of these interviews are conducted by admissions officers. They are conducted by alumni volunteers, usually meeting you at a coffee shop, a library, or over video call, and their role is fundamentally different from what a personal statement is doing. An essay shows how you write when you have unlimited time to draft and revise. An interview shows how you think and communicate in real time, and interviewers are typically asked to report specifically on things a written application cannot show: how you carry a conversation, how you respond when a question does not have an obvious answer, and whether the enthusiasm in your application is genuine when you are talking about it unscripted.
The Questions That Come Up Almost Every Time
Across schools and across interviewers, a small set of question types recur so consistently that they are worth genuinely preparing for rather than hoping to improvise well:
"Tell me about yourself." Almost every interview opens with some version of this, and it is more of a trap than it sounds, because an unfocused two-minute ramble through your entire life story wastes the best opening you will get to set the tone. The strongest answers pick two or three specific threads — an interest, an experience, a way you think about something — and let the interviewer's follow-up questions pull out the rest, rather than trying to cover everything unprompted.
"Why this school?" Interviewers can tell immediately when an answer is generic — "great academics," "beautiful campus," "strong reputation" — versus specific to something you have actually looked into: a particular research center, an unusual major combination, a specific class or professor whose work you know something about. This question rewards the same kind of research a strong "Why This College" essay rewards, and if you have already written one for this school, revisit it before your interview rather than reinventing your answer from scratch.
"What do you do outside of class?" This is not a request for your activities list read aloud. Interviewers are listening for what you actually care about and why, and the strongest answers go deep on one or two things rather than skimming across everything on your resume.
A genuine current-events or intellectual-interest question. Many interviewers ask some version of "what's something you've read, watched, or learned recently that stuck with you" or "what's a topic you could talk about for twenty minutes without getting bored." This question exists specifically to see whether your intellectual curiosity extends beyond what is required for class, and a rehearsed-sounding answer here is easy to spot.
"Do you have any questions for me?" Treated as an afterthought by many students, this is one of the most watched parts of the entire conversation. Arriving with no questions, or only logistical ones a five-minute web search would answer, reads as low genuine interest. A specific question about the interviewer's own experience — what they wish they had known before arriving, or how their thinking changed over four years — tends to land far better than a generic question about class size or dining halls.
What the Interview Actually Does to Your Application
Alumni interview reports are almost never the single deciding factor in an admissions decision, and schools are generally explicit about this in their own materials — a strong interview will not overcome a weak transcript, and a mediocre one will not sink an otherwise outstanding application on its own. What a good interview report does is add corroborating human evidence to what the rest of your file already suggests: that the curiosity in your essays is genuine, that you can hold a real conversation about your own interests, and that you would be a reasonable person to have in a seminar room or a dorm hallway. Where interviews matter most is in borderline cases, the same way test scores and LNAT results matter most at the margins in UK admissions — when an admissions committee is choosing between similarly strong applicants, a distinctly strong or distinctly weak interview report can be the detail that gets discussed.
Video Interviews Are Now the Norm, Not the Exception
A growing share of alumni interviews now happen over video call rather than in person, particularly for applicants who live far from an active alumni chapter or who are applying from outside the United States. The content of the conversation does not change, but a few practical details do. Log in a few minutes early rather than exactly on time, since a late start over video reads worse than a late arrival to a coffee shop meeting would. Sit somewhere quiet with a plain or tidy background, look at the camera rather than at your own image on the screen when you are speaking, and close every other tab and notification before the call starts — a phone buzzing on the desk mid-interview is a small thing that nonetheless breaks the flow of a conversation an interviewer is trying to assess. If your internet connection is unreliable, test it with a friend on the same platform the day before, and have the interviewer's contact information ready so you can quickly explain and reconnect if the call drops, rather than leaving them wondering whether you simply left.
How to Actually Prepare
Treat your interview the way you treated your supplemental essays: research the school specifically, revisit your own application so you can speak naturally about what you wrote, and practice out loud, not just in your head. Ask a parent, teacher, or friend to run through five or six of the questions above with you and give honest feedback on pacing and specificity, since most students discover in that first practice round that their answers run either far too short or far too long. Dress reasonably, arrive a few minutes early if it is in person, test your camera and internet connection well ahead of time if it is on video, and send a short, genuine thank-you note within a day or two afterward — a step many applicants skip, and one that costs almost nothing to include.
Interviews are also, genuinely, a two-way conversation. The alumni volunteer sitting across from you chose to give up an evening because they care about the school, and most of them are easier to talk with than students expect once the first question or two is out of the way. Walking in prepared rather than merely hopeful is what turns that conversation into an asset rather than a source of dread.