Admission Alumni Representative
Sample Interview Report: Hesitation
I met John at 8:45 on a crisp fall morning in front of the Congregational church in small-town Maine. As curious as such a location seems, its profound normalcy well echoed the very normal, small town, good and straightforwardly hard-working kid that is John.
John is interested in science and math, and to a certain extent the surrealism of science fiction—he's an avid fan of Stephen King, very much liked the recent popular book The Da Vinci Code,and spoke about the relativity of cultural knowledge as seen by an alien-stranger's introduction to earth in the book Stranger in a Strange Land.
John also likes creative writing, an described a character sketch he had written based upon an incident at Wendy's while he worked there: he described how he came to understand the cook there as a normal person, beyond his otherwise freakish behavior of remaining totally uncommunicative except for occasionally slapping the grill and declaring: "I am the grill master." Many are the wonders...
Throughout our conversation, John was thoughtful in presenting his interests but had a hard time articulating himself and often seemed unsure of himself. He hasn't taken the most challenging of courses in high school and is a bit taken aback by the academic focus of Reed.
John likes Reed primarily because of its location, and to a certain extent because of its academic distinction. (He likes to ski, and has heard great things about Portland's music scene.) Reed is definitely an outlier amongst the other schools that he's looking at, and my sense is that both in terms of his application as well as fit, he's not a candidate that would be tremendously successful.