I sat in the small elementary school library and passed my eyes over the thirty-plus hopefuls, trying to size up the competition. Having read Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar three times in both English and Spanish (it was a bilingual school) to pass the time waiting for the interviewer to arrive, I desperately searched the room for something to take my mind off my current situation. Relief flooded my body when the interviewer came through doors at last.
“Hello,” the man said and introduced himself. “As you can see, there are quite a few applicants vying for spots at the university. So many, in fact, that we had to interview everyone from your town in the same location.”
“This guy looks intense,” my best friend whispered into my ear. “I don’t want to get him.”
“Over 30,000 students applied to the university,” he said. Defeated sighs, shocked gasps, and high-pitched whistles echoed throughout the library. “It would be reasonable to say one, maybe two, of you will receive admission. After the thirty- minute interview is over, I’ll let you know whether or not I’ll be writing a letter recommendation on your behalf. Good luck to you all and thank you for coming today.”
My palms broke out into a cold sweat, the way they did before an orchestra performance or a Calculus test. I nervously wiped them on my pencil skirt (the one that I had practically torn my closet apart looking for) and shut my eyes, going over the key points I had practiced with my mother earlier that morning.
“Christina, are you alright?” one of my classmates asked.
“I just can’t wait for this to be over,” I groaned, cursing the day I decided to sign up for the interview. I spent the next three hours going over possible questions they were going to ask us with my friends, accosting strangers for information after they had been interviewed, guessing which interviewer was the nicest, and anxiously tracing the illustrations painted on the walls with my eyes.
“Christina Davis?” a voice called out.
My head jerked up suddenly and I locked eyes with my interviewer: it was the intense-looking main interviewer that everyone wanted to avoid. With quaking hands, I pushed myself out of the chair and walked slowly towards him. I ignored the hoots and hollers coming from the table of my classmates and stuck my hand out firmly.
“Hi, I’m Christina Davis,” I smiled brightly (but hopefully not too brightly), and shook his hand.
“Nice to meet you,” he replied. “Right this way.” I followed him briskly down the hallway and into an office. Not just any office, but the principal’s office. I cracked some corny joke about not having spent much time there and immediately winced afterward. He laughed nevertheless, and I immediately felt a change in the atmosphere. He wasn’t here to chew me out about my grades and test scores. In fact, he had never even seen them, because he was not an admissions officer, but a loyal and dedicated alum conducting interviews in his hometown. Instead, he was here to gauge what kind of a person I was and if I would be a good fit for his alma mater.
We began with the basic questions about my extracurricular activities, my favorite class, why I had applied to the university, and what I liked most about it. We then moved on to the more personal, tougher questions. He relayed his experiences as a minority (he was Asian) at the university, and how everything wasn’t always peachy. He asked if I had been in a similar situation, to which I replied “Yes, pretty much through my entire life.” I elaborated on my experiences as a minority in an almost completely Caucasian neighborhood and in a predominantly Asian and white academic program at school, and how it had been a struggle (to say the least) to overcome such obstacles. We had a genuine conversation about shared experiences, and I found myself forgetting that this was an interview.
The final question, the one that I had been dreading, came next. He asked me what I wanted to do after college with my English degree. I paused for a few moments, frantically searching my mind for the perfect answer. It was then that I realized I didn’t have one, so I told him exactly that. For the next ten minutes we discussed my interests, strengths, and weaknesses, and combined those into a master plan for my future, leaving us both excited for the endless possibilities. At the end of the interview he said he would be delighted to write a letter of recommendation for me to advocate my admission to the school. I thanked him about sixty times, said goodbye to my friends that were still waiting, and drove home jittery with excitement.
I had been worried about something that was completely out of my control. Looking back, I shake my head at how silly it was to be so nervous. Once I realized my only job during the interview was to be myself and give the interviewer an accurate representation of who I was, it was smooth sailing for the remaining portion of the interview. I conquered my worries that day, something I never dreamed possible, and will carry the things I learned about myself during the interview with me for the rest of my life.
Editor’s Note: Christina has since been accepted to Brown University’s Class of 2015. She believes this interview played a significant role in her acceptance. She has not definitively decided to attend Brown next fall, but is incredibly thankful for her acceptance.