Every fall I get the same two questions about interviews, from the same family, in the same breath. Does it matter? And what if my kid is bad at it?
Yes, and they won’t be. Here’s why.
What the interview actually risks
Admissions officers on a panel I listened to this spring put the number plainly: an interview hurts an applicant somewhere around 2 to 3% of the time. That is the rate at which a report comes back with a concern serious enough to move a decision. A quiet student, a nervous student, a student who took a beat before every answer does not land in that 2 to 3%. Colleges are building a class of 1,600 personalities, not 1,600 debate captains. An interviewer might note that a student was reserved. A note is not a verdict.
The people doing these interviews, alumni and admissions staff alike, are practiced at making a seventeen-year-old comfortable and steering the conversation somewhere useful. Your student is not carrying the interview alone.
What skipping it risks
This is the side families underweight. When a college marks the interview optional, it still knows who took it and who didn’t. Schools have gotten sophisticated about predicting yield, and participation in the optional things, the interview, the visit, the information session, is one of the inputs. A student who declines the interview at a school that tracks demonstrated interest has handed the reader a small piece of evidence that they may not enroll.
So the math is lopsided. Take the interview and the likely outcomes are neutral or positive. Skip it and the likely outcomes are neutral or negative. If your student can reasonably do it, they do it.
The same logic applies to the visit, with one wrinkle: being on campus is not the same as being recorded on campus. Sign in at admissions. If the office is closed, most campuses now have QR codes on self-guided tour stops for exactly this reason. Use them. I covered the visit itself in an earlier post.
Why the fuller application wins
One panelist described the difference between a bare application and a full one as the difference between a presentation in black and white and the same one in color. Every optional component, the interview, the additional essay, the extra recommendation, gives the reader another angle on the same student. None of it is about manufacturing a persona. It’s about giving the person deciding your student’s file enough real context to advocate for them in committee. I’ve written before about why optional means required. The interview is the most human version of that rule.
How to prepare without over-preparing
Three things, none of them a script.
First, know the school well enough to ask a question that can’t be answered in thirty seconds on the website. “What’s the engineering program like?” is a search query. “I read that the engineering school moved to a common first year in 2023. How has that changed which students end up in which majors?” is a conversation. The panelists were clear that one strong question can lift an otherwise ordinary interview.
Second, give the student permission to buy time. If a question is confusing, ask the interviewer to rephrase it. If it’s a big one, say so and ask to come back to it. Both read as composure, not weakness. A seventeen-year-old who can say “let me think about that for a second” is doing something most adults can’t.
Third, don’t be afraid of the honest question. Start from something the student already knows about the school, then ask about the part that isn’t in the brochure: what students there complain about, what the school is trying to fix, what the interviewer would change. Interviewers remember the conversation that felt like a conversation.
The actual message
Prepare. Show up. Ask one real question. Then stop worrying about being perfect, because perfect isn’t what the interviewer is grading. They’re trying to answer one question for the committee: is this the person the application says it is? For a student whose application is real, that’s an easy interview to pass.
