How to Beast an Interview

Prime Directive

Be interesting/cool/intelligent/someone they would want to go on a road trip with.

The Mental Game

Admissions interviewers are your friends. Be fluent and genuine. It's an amazing feeling to realize that the real you is actually good enough -- you don't have to pretend.

The Basics

Your goal in the college interview is to prove that you are an interesting and engaging (and cool, friendly, positive) person; as with the rest of your application, you want to come across as someone they would find it fascinating to go on a cross-country road trip with.

Talk about interesting stuff. This can be cool projects you've worked on, cool research you've done, cool internships you've had, cool classes you've taken, cool revelations you've had, cool philosophical concepts you've stumbled upon, cool books you've read, interesting recent developments in the news that provoke thought, interesting trends in modern society; steer the conversation towards items you can talk about.

Be alert and well rested but completely chill. Interviewers are your friends and are trying to make a case to get you in to the college.

The interviewer asks you about your life and achievements plus your interests, philosophies, and aspirations. For most of the process, the best preparation is to simply be enthusiastic about life as you travel through it. Don't lose your exuberance to nerves on the threshold of the coffee shop or cafe where you're supposed to meet the person.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What would you do with $1,000,000,000?
• What are you interested in studying and why?
• Why do you really want to go to the school? For instance you really liked MIT's OpenCourseWare, and it helped you on X project which you wrote about in your application. Or Stanford's philosophy encyclopedia, or Princeton's WordNet.

Your goal is to come across as an enlightened, positive, motivated, and profoundly interesting person who gives the interviewer faith in the future of humanity.

MIT-Specific Advice

Bring a project, show it off, talk about how something clever you did actually works. If it's a website where the interface is the clever part, talk about the general and critically important trend of optimizing life that you are following in building that website. Are you minimizing keystrokes somewhere? Are you saving people time? Are you making something more efficient? All of this is conversation material.

Make sure it's impressive. Practice or demonstrate beforehand and, above all, make sure that whatever you're showing off is slick and clever, even if it's small.

You are allowed to mention nerdy stuff like xkcd depending on your interviewer.