I Interview Because…

Still in Rotation: Young Americans (D... History Sometimes Repeats

I Interview Because…

For the past decade or so, I’ve volunteered for my alma mater’s Secondary School Committee. We’re the group that does alumni interviews for Bay Area kids applying to the university I attended on the East Coast who may not have a chance to travel there and interview in person. Recently the school sent us all the following form, and asked us to fill it out and take a selfie with it.

The primary reason I interview is because I get to spend 45 minutes with smart, ambitious kids from local high schools. Meeting all these applicants over the years gave me a good sense of what the local area high schools had on offer, so much so that when my eldest daughter chose the school she’d attend, I knew we were in good hands. I am always, without exception, impressed by the curiosity, achievements, and good manners of the young people I meet in these interviews. If you want to feel good about who will be running the country when you retire, I recommend doing some alumni interviews with current high school seniors.

But f you’re asking me to fill out the “I Interview Because” form completely and honestly, I need a few more sheets of paper. I also interview because:

When one of the interviewees asks about my favorite class or professor, it’s a chance to really test my memory capabilities for a name, any name…”Professor Perlmutter? And I think I took a class on nineteenth century British women’s novelists that was good. I’m pretty sure I took one, anyway. It might have been my friend Maria who took it.”
As a native upstate New Yorker, I like to say things to Bay Area-raised students like, “Have you thought about winter in Philadelphia? You know it’s going to be cold. I MEAN COLD. Icy. Do you know how to walk on ice? Do you have mittens?”
It gives me a chance to do a small nutritional infomercial about Philadelphia cuisine, namely, why cheese fries and a Diet Coke are the best way to recover from a late night out.
Ok, there’s a tiny bit of schadenfreude in knowing that I never have to take the SAT again.
My spiel about “finding your passion in one of the many clubs the school has to offer” is really just a chance for me to talk about the time I crewed backstage when New Order played on campus. #GloryDays.
My beloved grad school just narrowly avoided a disastrous acquisition by Laureate Education a.k.a Kaplan Learning Centers, so it seems more important than ever to align with a university that is financially stable. (Related note: my grad school looks like it will be acquired by Arizona State University instead, so I guess I get a new ASU diploma?)
Some tiny corner of my brain actually believes that doing alumni interviews will be viewed by the Admissions Office with the same favor as donating a building or endowing a chair, should my kids choose to apply to my alma mater.
My ego needs the annual reality check that I’d have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting into my university now.