Interview over coffee

The Alumni Interview Endures

28,917 interviews offered, 7,330 volunteers, 161 countries: The numbers get bigger, the world gets more complicated, but this tradition is going strong

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By David Montgomery ’83

Published March 28, 2024

17 min read

ROBERT BERNSTEIN ’08 WILL NEVER FORGET the encounter he had more than two decades ago at the intersection of East Grant and North Swan roads in Tucson, Arizona. It was the winter of 2003-04, and he was a high school senior. He was sitting at a table outside a shopping plaza, having the first substantive conversation of his life with a Princetonian — his alumni interview.

“Kids from Tucson didn’t really go to Princeton,” Bernstein recalls. “I didn’t know anyone from Tucson who had gone to Princeton, so meeting with Fred was impactful for me.”

Fred Frelinghuysen ’75, the interviewer, guided the conversation to Bernstein’s interests, including civics work and politics. He guessed that Bernstein might one day work in Washington, D.C. “I would try to get a sense of what the University didn’t have” in a prospective student’s written application, Frelinghuysen says of his approach during roughly eight years of volunteering as an alumni interviewer. The admission office “had the numbers. They had the recommendation letters. But what’s this person like?”

“I was just touched that this person, the interviewer, showed so much interest in me, lent so much time, just the authenticity and sincerity of the questions,” Bernstein says. “And I remember leaving the interview and thinking, ‘Who knows what will happen? But that was a wonderful conversation.’”

After Bernstein was admitted, Frelinghuysen sent him a letter of congratulations and a book, Katharine Graham’s Washington. Bernstein tucked the letter inside and shelved the book close by his desk, where it remained all through his years at Princeton, then law school, and throughout his career to this day. He did eventually land in Washington; now he’s a lawyer in Denver. One of the first steps he took upon graduating from Princeton was to become an alumni interviewer himself, to try to give to new generations of applicants the same meaningful encounter he had valued so much.

 Last June ­­— nearly 20 years after that indelible conversation in Tucson — an email popped up in Bernstein’s inbox. Cyrus Hatam ’23, a newly minted alumnus, was reaching back out to his alumni interviewer to explain just how much their conversation in a Washington, D.C., coffee shop had meant to him. “I always tell people how we talked for nearly two hours and went on several tangents about basketball,” Hatam wrote. “In case you were wondering, Arnold Schwarzenegger is still one of my idols, and I actually started a campaign to get him to speak at our graduation this year (which unfortunately failed but maybe next year).”

Hatam moved to San Francisco after graduation and took a job investing in clean energy. In his note to Bernstein, he added one more thing: “I definitely want to become an interviewer as well.”

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Fred Frelinghuysen ’75

Fred Frelinghuysen ’75

Photo: Courtesy of Frelinghuysen ’75

Three Tigers, in three cities, are now linked across decades by this distinctive, deeply traditional, sometimes awkward, and more-complicated-than-ever feature of the journey to a Princeton education. Alumni interviewing is the largest form of volunteer service to the University, with more than 7,000 alumni conducting interviews each year. The interviews are optional, but most applicants seize the opportunity. As the number of applications has surged past 39,000 a year, the most in Princeton history, tens of thousands of these conversations are taking place — mostly via video chats, but also in coffee shops, libraries, offices, and parks — across the country and around the world. For students, the alumni interview is a near-universal rite of entry to Princeton, the first point of contact in a lifelong relationship with the University. For the vast majority of applicants who don’t end up at Princeton, it may feel like the conversation that didn’t go anywhere.

The rich exchanges of Frelinghuysen, Bernstein, and Hatam — and the strong alumni engagement they inspired — represent the ideal of the interview process. The University maintains a strong commitment to the program because  the interviews can provide vital insights about applicants, according to Karen Richardson ’93, the dean of admission.

Admission officers “don’t have the chance to sit down and have a half-an-hour conversation with applicants to learn more about them and to … give some more meat to their application,” Richardson says. “The write-ups that we receive from [alumni interviewers] can help to really bring some of that story to life. It can either confirm or disprove some of the narrative that we are seeing in the student’s essays and the recommendation letters … . We’re trying to figure out, as we’re building this community, who this student might be and how they might contribute to the dynamic community that’s already here.”

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Robert Bernstein ’08

Robert Bernstein ’08

Photo: Courtesy of Bernstein ’08

Still, with the odds of gaining admission to Princeton getting slimmer, interviewers sometimes joke about going years without seeing anyone they interviewed be admitted. But Richardson says the interviews perform an ambassadorial function for the University even if they don’t lead to an admitted student. They show that Princeton is the kind of place that cares about meeting applicants as individuals. “Our hope is that every student — whether they are admitted or not, and whether they’re admitted and decide not to come to Princeton,” Richardson says, “that they can walk away saying, ‘Wow, that was a really nice conversation that I had with this person, and I learned about this place.’”

Yet the persistence of Princeton’s program is increasingly unusual. Some other highly selective universities have scaled back alumni interviews in recent years or eliminated them entirely. They generally cite the challenge of recruiting enough alumni to offer interviews to most, if not all, applicants who want one. In addition, the national spotlight on elite university admission practices, coupled with the recent Supreme Court decision forbidding the consideration of race and ethnicity as factors in admission, make it a potentially more sensitive matter to rely on thousands of alumni — who are not, after all, professional admission representatives — to engage with prospective students.

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Cyrus Hatam ’23

Cyrus Hatam ’23

Photo: Courtesy of Hatam ’23

Columbia suspended its alumni interview program as of the 2023-24 admission cycle because alumni were unable to interview the “vast majority” of applicants, according to a statement last May. The University of Chicago replaced alumni and on-campus interviews with an option for applicants to submit a two-minute video introduction, starting with the Class of 2023. Brown has also shifted to video introductions since the 2019-20 academic year, “in the interest of ensuring equity of experience and opportunity among applicants,” according to its admission webpage.

“We found at Brown, at least, and I’m going to assume that it’s starting to happen across the board, that as the volume of applicants continued to increase each year, there were just not enough alumni interviewers to conduct these interviews,” says Connie Livingston, a former assistant director of admission at Brown who is now head of counselors at Empowerly college admission counseling. The videos are “really a great opportunity to get to know students a little bit better, which is exactly what the purpose of an alumni interview is.”

The University of Pennsylvania recently recast alumni interviews as “alumni conversations” which “provide an opportunity for you to learn about Penn through an alum’s experience, and for us to learn more about you,” according to the admission website, which also cautions, “Please don’t worry if you’re not contacted for this opportunity,” because the availability of alumni volunteers is limited. At Cornell, instead of interviews, the university offers applicants the chance to request an informal, non-evaluative conversation with an alumnus to ask questions about the university.

Harvard and Yale offer interviews at the discretion of their admission committees, in part based on prioritizing applicants about whom admission officers would like more information to make their decisions. One way to interpret that approach is, “The students who are definitely not getting in are not getting an interview, and the students who are definitely getting accepted are not getting an interview,” says Laurie Kopp Weingarten, president of One-Stop College Counseling. Whereas, “if you apply to Princeton and you have very bad grades, you will still get an interview, even though you’re not getting into Princeton.”

Like Princeton, Dartmouth aspires to offer alumni interviews to as many applicants as possible, as do MIT and Stanford. At Georgetown, alumni interviews are required of all applicants unless no alumni are available for interviews in a particular region.

At Princeton, there continues to be such strong alumni volunteer support for the program that interviewers reach out to 93% to 94% of applicants who opt to be interviewed, according to the University. “We are very fortunate in that … alums want to be ambassadors for Princeton
and still have such a connection to the place that they want to be able to share those experiences,” Richardson says.

Many of those who are not contacted for interviews live in countries where there are few alums to conduct them. There also have been times in recent years when conflict or unrest caused even remote interviews to be temporarily suspended in Syria, Yemen, and Iran, says Nasser Bin Nasser *03, chair of the interview program in Jordan who also has served as chair for Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Lebanon. The lack of an interview — either because the prospective student opted out, or because an interview connection could not be made — is never counted against an applicant, according to the admission office.

The University has also taken steps to prepare interviewers to operate in accordance with the Supreme Court decision on race and ethnicity in admission. In addition to two webinars that interviewers were invited to attend in recent months, the Office of the General Counsel prepared a FAQ sheet on the court ruling that interviewers must acknowledge having read. The document reminds volunteers not to ask questions “relating to race, color, national origin, ethnicity, or ancestry” and not to mention those characteristics in their interview reports. If an applicant brings up those demographics, alums should shift the discussion to how such characteristics may have shaped the student’s “experiences, determination, courage, leadership skills, and accomplishments — all of which are perfectly fine to discuss with the applicant.”

Richardson says that interviewers have long been instructed to focus on “lived experiences” rather than demographics, so the practical effect of the court ruling on the conversations should be minimal. Helen Dorini ’91, senior assistant dean and liaison to the alumni interview program, adds, “I don’t think alums need to change what they were doing, if they’re doing things the way we wanted them to do it in the past.”

Members of the the Princeton Schools Committee and admission office

Members of the the Princeton Schools Committee and admission office gather at Maclean House in April 2023.

Photo: Courtesy of Princeton Schools Committee

THESE POTENTIALLY LIFE-ALTERING CHATS started happening in a formalized way just after World War II. There was a nationwide surge of applicants to college, and admission officers needed help assessing candidates. “The Admissions Office will still, of course, make the final decision as to which candidates shall be admitted, but the reports of alumni who have had an interview with them will be of invaluable assistance,” The Daily Princetonian reported in 1946.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, regional Alumni Schools Committee members played roles in both recruiting applicants and interviewing many of them, according to coverage in the Prince and anecdotes from alumni of the era. Alumni would get tips from guidance counselors, and they might be familiar with a student before the interview. By 1983, the Princeton interview was enough of a cultural phenomenon to earn the honor of mockery in the film Risky Business. In one scene, a hapless Princeton interviewer is trying to make sense of the Ray-Bans-sporting character played by Tom Cruise, while an outrageous house party swirls in the background.    

Since then, the practice has evolved significantly. Today, interviewers are discouraged from contacting high schools and are not provided any background on students before the interviews so their impressions will be fresh. They also receive extensive training materials on how to conduct the interviews, though there’s no prescribed set of questions to ask. “In my mind, the most important part of this interview is that they try to have a good, warm conversation,” Dorini says.

The logistics of deploying more than 7,000 volunteers to reach as many applicants as possible are dizzying. The interviewers are organized into more than 300 Alumni Schools Committee regions, each responsible for applicants from different parts of the United States or from different countries. In addition, there is a “central pool” where alumni can pick up interview assignments outside their region to support regions or countries that have a shortage of volunteers. A volunteer may interview anywhere from a handful to more than a dozen applicants a year. Nearly 20% of the interviewers come from the most recent five classes of graduates, but the interview pool spans eight decades: Interviewers for single choice early action this past fall ranged from the Class of 1944 to the Class of 2023.

Sitting atop this global network is the Princeton Schools Committee, which oversees and supports the Alumni Schools Committee regions, in partnership with the Office of Admission. The current volunteer chair of the Princeton Schools Committee is the seemingly indefatigable Charlene Huang Olson ’88, who says alumni interviews are more vital than ever. Given Princeton’s strides at drawing applicants from diverse backgrounds, Olson says, a large number of prospective students “don’t have family or friends who went to Princeton. They may never have met a person who went to Princeton. And a lot of them have never been to campus. ... They just know that Princeton is a phenomenal school.” The interview serves as a first encounter. “We are making an impression on these young students,” Olson says. “They’re formulating their impression about Princeton and about Princeton alumni.”

More volunteers are always welcome because “the number of applicants doesn’t usually ever go down,” Olson adds. (To sign up, go to bit.ly/psc_signup.)   

Sometimes the conversations fall short of the ideal reflected in the exchanges that Bernstein and Hatam still cherish. Bradley Saft ’00 recalls how his interviewer in the mid-1990s turned the conversation into a trivia test: Countries with multiple capital cities? Largest landlocked country in Africa? Name of a country that begins with the letter “A” but doesn’t end in “A”?

To that last one, Saft said Azerbaijan, but the interviewer argued that Azerbaijan wasn’t a country (even though the U.S. recognized it in 1991). He was looking for Afghanistan.

“I came out of it feeling honestly very deflated because I didn’t think I was going to get in because I didn’t know the answers to these questions,” Saft says now. But he turned his disappointment into an opportunity. “I thought, boy, if I’m ever fortunate enough to be able to be admitted here and to matriculate, I want to create better experiences for the students that I meet than the one that I had. So when I graduated, the first thing I did was sign up for alumni interviewing. I really wanted to have the opportunity to make great experiences for people who are interested in the school.”

Saft became chair of the Princeton Schools Committee in 2019 and helped foster a significant evolution in the interview program known as “Positively Princeton.” The idea was for interviewers — in case they had any doubt — to think of themselves as ambassadors for Princeton and communicators of an applicant’s qualities rather than simply as evaluators or, worse, judges. “If you go into it approaching the conversation [by] saying that you are here to evaluate a high school senior, it sets you up for a dynamic that is inherently confrontational, as opposed to, I am here to educate, to enlighten, to share the love, and to add some color to the application that the admission office may not have,” Saft says. “When you go into it thinking that is your goal, then it’s inherently a positive conversation. It can’t be anything but positive.”

That approach is second nature to the newest generation of alumni interviewers, such as Ashlyn Lackey ’18, who has served as a recent alumni rep on the Princeton Schools Committee and recruits young alum interviewers. “You are not a gatekeeper” to Princeton, she says. “You are a portal into Princeton.”

PART OF BEING A PORTAL TO PRINCETON is embodying a University community that may defy the expectations of students who have an outdated image of the place, says Aseneth Garza Scott ’13, who grew up in Texas near the Mexican border and has interviewed students from there as well as from Georgia and Tennessee, where she is a dean at an arts magnet school.

“I have had students tell me, ‘You’re not at all who I expected to see’” — meaning a Latina whose parents didn’t go to college, for whom Princeton was her dream school, and who used her Ivy League education to work in public schools, says Scott. “When I was interviewing people in South Texas … I was someone from my community ... . Kids were really curious about how my narrative was at Princeton … . It was often, like, ‘What got you there?’ ... They’ll ask me, ‘What’s it like being in the cold? ... What is it like living with people that are not Hispanic?’”

Still, there is an evaluative component to the interviews. Interviewers are asked to rate their “overall impression” of the student on a scale from “enthusiastic” to “with reservation.” But admission officers say the other two sections of the interviewers’ reports are more important: Interviewers are asked to write up to 3,000 characters on the content of the conversation, including what the student is enthusiastic about and any special circumstances that might shed light on their lives. They are also asked to write up to 1,000 characters on their overall impression, including such observations as what the student’s strengths are, would they make a good roommate, would they thrive at Princeton.

Interviewers are “here to educate, to enlighten, to share the love, and to add some color to the application that the admission office may not have. When you go into it thinking that is your goal, then it’s inherently a positive conversation.”

— Bradley Saft ’00
Former chair of the Princeton Schools Committee

Interviewers typically devote part of the conversation to asking students if they have any questions. The students’ curiosity is often driven by what’s in the news, says Nasser, one of more than 800 graduate alums who volunteer to interview undergraduate applicants. His first week at Princeton coincided with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and now, during interviews he conducts at a coffee shop in Amman, Jordan, students express some of the same worries that loomed back then. “This year I have a lot of students asking me whether it’s safe for Muslims, whether it’s safe for Arabs, at Princeton,” he says. “People can feel free asking me this kind of question. But I don’t think they could ask an American interviewer that same question … . My message is that Princeton is a safe space. Regardless of what’s going on in the broader context of the country’s politics, Princeton itself is a very safe space.”

The Supreme Court decision hasn’t blocked communication of the essence of students’ stories, which goes deeper than demographic categories, says Doris Ofori ’17, who was born in Ghana, raised in the Bronx, and now serves remotely as the interview chair for Ghana while she attends business school. “You can remove the fact that they’re Black, remove the fact that they’re Ghanian, remove all these labels that we identify as affirmative-action-related,” she says. “At its core, the student’s drive, the student’s motivation, the student’s ambition will still be evident … . It’s about what are those unique experiences … as a byproduct of all the things you have to deal with growing up that have shaped you and formed you to be this individual.”

The 15 alumni interviewers who spoke with PAW say they are impressed and even inspired by most of the students they meet. But for some it was hard getting used to long dry spells of writing glowing reports on students without any being admitted. As admission rates hover around 5%, an average of 19 out of 20 conversations will not lead to an admitted student. (Of 39,644 applicants to the Class of 2027, 1,782 were admitted, or about 4.5%, according to the University.) Of course, each interviewer only meets a tiny sample of applicants and can’t know the strengths of the others. Lloyd Lawrence ’76, a longtime volunteer and interviewer mentor, whose preferred interview locations are Dairy Queens around Austin, Texas, recalls interviewing one young woman who seemed beyond outstanding. Yet she didn’t get admitted. “I don’t take it as a personal failure, but I just wonder what manner of other students, what kind of qualifications they were presenting, that would make hers look ordinary,” Lawrence says.

Faced with the unforgiving math, alumni interviewers focus on what’s most important about their role: To sustain stimulating and authentic conversations, then write the most compelling 4,000-character reports that they can. Whatever the outcome, such an encounter can still have an impact, and will certainly say something about Princeton, wherever the students end up.

“You don’t know who’s going to become a future Tiger,” Olson says. “The fact that Princeton offers this to any student who would like one, I think that’s the ultimate message of welcome … . It’s that personal connection that also sends this message to the students that Princeton is a little different. We think you’re not just an applicant number. You’re a person — and we want to meet that person.”

David Montgomery ’83 is a freelance journalist and former staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine.

20 Responses

Stewart A. Levin ’75

3 Weeks Ago

I agree with Gene Dougherty that we interviewers serve as ambassadors for Princeton. In my invitation email to students, I write:

“This informal interview has two main purposes:
1) to add a fresh dimension beyond the information in your application, for example enlarging on an area that you feel comes across better in person than on paper, and
2) to give you an opportunity to find out more about the Princeton experience than just the information on the Princeton web site and information booklets.
In a nutshell, we volunteers serve both as an advocate for you to Princeton and an advocate of Princeton to you.”

Lynne Archibald ’87

2 Months Ago

I’ve been interviewing applicants to Princeton for over 20 years (with two years off when my children applied), and it has been extremely rewarding. I have great admiration for the work of the Office of Admission, the Alumni Schools Committee, and the Princeton Schools Committee. Although some alumni have balked, I have been impressed by the new procedures (online tutorials, webinars, zoom interviews, sample texts) and believe they have made the alumni interview process more fair and more professional.

Since 2020, I have also been involved with Divest Princeton (fossil fuels) as an alumni organizer. As part of that work, I have written articles and gone on the record criticizing the policies of the Trustees of Princeton with regards to the climate crisis. Following the University’s partial divestment and dissociation from fossil fuels in 2022, we have continued to demand that the University sever all ties with the fossil fuel industry. I have never mentioned my views or these activities in interviews with applicants and would never do so. I did not sense any conflict of interest in continuing to be an ASC interviewer because I believed that encouraging the best and brightest to choose Princeton would help Princeton to become the best that it can be.

I now find myself in a different position. The University’s response to the nonviolent protests on campus this spring called into question the ethics of encouraging a young person to attend Princeton. The University spends a huge amount of time lauding those who have fought for freedom in varied contexts in the past but when they were faced with their own brave students peacefully asking for justice now, the University had them arrested. The administration then banned Princeton students from their own campus and expelled them from their housing. This shocked me profoundly — shelter is one of the most basic human needs.

The Princeton administration chose to put its own students in jeopardy. When high school students ask if they should go to Princeton, I can no longer answer “yes.” It is with great regret, therefore, that I am resigning as chair of the Alumni Schools Committee for Portugal.

Naran Burchinow ’75

2 Months Ago

I was an active interviewer in the Northwest Ohio region for over 14 years, and I estimate interviewed over 100 applicants. I have mixed reactions to the process.

First and foremost, the applicants are almost without exception great to meet. They are representative of the brightest and most engaged of their generation and make one truly optimistic about society’s future.

And, truth be told, meeting them generally made me glad I wasn’t competing against students like them when I applied to Princeton (although I am proud that my generation did not benefit from the cottage industry of advisers, tutors, and consultants who now polish students’ résumés like diamonds).

I did find it a bit off-putting to never get any feedback on my interview reports. I get that there are privacy concerns at work here, but never to get any response that my evaluations are too hard, too easy, just right, way off the mark, or right on point does make it impossible to know if I am doing a decent job or providing useful information. It’s hard to resist a sense that my input just goes to West College and gets filed someplace, never to see the light of day.

It would be satisfying to learn who got accepted. Again, I understand the privacy concerns. One time I did not learn two siblings I had interviewed were accepted until after they had graduated, and that was because I ran into them at an event.

While the great majority of applicants I met were terrific, I was surprised by the number who applied without knowing anything about Princeton. There were students who asked about a sports management major, the law school and med school, and those who had never heard of the senior thesis or the eating clubs. I chalk that down to the Common Application and the virtual arms race that applying to competitive schools has become.

I thought I would stop interviewing when I retired from work. At that age, I was as old as the applicants’ grandparents, and thought the students would be better served by someone whose knowledge of the University was more recent than 47 years ago. But then I moved to Southern California, and the local Princeton region needed some volunteers.

Peter M. Carver ’72

3 Months Ago

I’ve been living in Southeast Asia since 1973. I conducted my first interview with a Singaporean student who was admitted and graduated as a member of the Class of ’79. I lived for many years in Jakarta, Indonesia, where a fellow alum and I conducted 20-30 interviews each per year. I’m now back in Singapore. Until the COVID lockdown and remote interviews, I volunteered to conduct 20 per year but am now down to 10 per year. (Getting old, LOL.)

Why do I do it? It is for an applicant who has opted for an interview. I do enjoy meeting bright, enthusiastic teens and garnering a glimpse of the “next” generation. There is only one student I gave a “poor” rating. He was a fascinating lad but his English comprehension would have placed an unfair burden on him, if he had been accepted. Most I rated as highly as I could and truly believed they would excel at Tigertown, contributing in their unique way to its environment. The result of all these interviews is six were accepted and of this group two declined to attend elsewhere. (My success rate dropped drastically after year one.) Am I offended, believing I have wasted my time? No. They asked for an interview and got one. Good or poor prospect, they were treated equally well.

For most. it is the first contact they have probably had with someone connected with Princeton. It is a human contact vs. the written forms that comprise most of their application. Many have interesting questions.

If there are 33,000 applicants for 1,800 spaces that is a hit rate of 5.5%. Yet, this does not mean that if you interview 200 candidates that 11 will get in. It is disheartening that one puts all his efforts into an interview, views the candidate as top notch, rates him highly, but he fails to get in. The admissions office has a thankless job and I think we all believe more qualified candidates are turned down than accepted. The applicants know the odds better than we do.

I tell all applicants I’m rooting for their acceptance but the odds are not in their favour. But, wherever they go, they will meet new people and make new friends. The quality of their education depends on their efforts — not the brick and mortar of a place in New Jersey.

If you feel you are wasting your time, do not be an interviewer. This is not a competition; you are not graded on numbers interviewed vs. accepted. The number you interview that get in vs. do not, does not make you a better or worse person, interviewer, etc.

We are all blessed by having attended Princeton. The applicants who do not get in will only have memories of and friends from where they attend. If they are as good as you say they are, they will do well wherever they go.

Rory Remer ’68

3 Months Ago

After 50 years as a Princeton Alumni Schools Committee interviewer and 45 years as a university faculty member at other institutions, I struggle as Chuck Bethel ’68 has. His points are well taken, though the question of “better things … to do” is, for me, more other things. The reality of the odds of admission is painful, particularly in that I think three of my interviewees have been accepted over the years. Still I interview. Whether a rationale or a rationalization, I do so because whether or not an interviewee is even one of the “ best and brightest,” I can possibly share a piece of the Princeton experience, that has meant so much in my lived experience. Perhaps that will have a significant impact. For me, in the time I have left, that is worth the investment, and my contribution to “Princeton in the nation’s service” (and beyond).

Ken McCarthy ’81

3 Months Ago

If Princeton were an embodied being, it would have callouses on its palms from all the patting itself on the back it does.

It’s understandable that the institution errs in this direction; they all do. On the other hand, when a school advertises its intellectual and moral rigor, it should occasionally make an attempt to walk its talk.

As readers pointed out in previous letters on this topic, to put young people through the very real strains of preparing for an interview when admissions has zero intention of enrolling them and saying it’s being done essentially for public relations purposes (“an ambassadorial function”) is so misguided, it’s hard to know where to start. The fact that it’s pointlessly cruel is probably enough of a reason to reform this practice.

Related to Chuck Bethel ’68’s point, we can’t change the world, but we live in a state with numerous impoverished communities — Trenton, Camden, Newark, and the city where Princeton was born, Elizabeth (deep amnesia on that one). Our alumni’s intellectual and moral prowess (and the school’s massive endowment) could be better spent getting to know the young people of this state and learning how we can help them, not lining them up for interviews as part of a bizarre and pointless PR campaign.

Alfred J. Kuffler ’64

3 Months Ago

I have read with interest the letters published in the latest issue of PAW on the above subject. 

In 1972 or thereabouts I interviewed about 40 applicants. None I thought worthy of admission were accepted, but several I thought would make no contribution to the community did pass through the admissions portal. 

This experience was discouraging to put it mildly. I did not continue interviewing. My conclusion was that using alumni to interview was just a device to keep Princeton in the consciousness of graduates.

Gene Dougherty *80

4 Months Ago

This letter is to express my appreciation for David Montgomery ’83’s article on alumni interviewing in the April 2024 Princeton Alumni Weekly. A graduate alumnus, I have been an interviewer for 17 years. I love interviewing: Meeting and connecting with candidates for Princeton has always been a treat for me. I only wish that I was able to interview more than the seven or eight whom I am able to interview every year.

To be sure, only a few highly qualified students I interview can be accepted for admission, but I think the interviews have intrinsic value. (My own experiences are such that I think the Admission Office does a super job with selecting quality candidates for admission.) Maybe the candidate interviewed should — but doesn’t — get an offer of admission as an undergraduate, but if the interview is positive, they may return later to Princeton for potential admission to the graduate school, or as a postdoc, or maybe even as a future teacher or professor.

As an ambassador for Princeton, I strive to keep my interviews informative, helpful, and positive. Moreover, as Bradley Saft ’00 stated in the article, I also try to “add some color to the application that the admission office may not have.” I think interviews have value, for Princeton, for the candidate — accepted or not — and for me as an interviewer. I hope the in-person interviews continue. I also hope I can do this for another 17 years. As one of the thousands of us who interview every year, a big thank you again for this article. Go Tigers! 

Chuck Bethel ’68

5 Months Ago

My several years as an interviewer convinced me that the program is a titanic waste of alumni time and energy that could be put to better use. For openers, what other organization — of any kind — offers to interview 40,000 applicants for 1,800 positions? What organization would brag about it? The dean of admission provides two rationales: Princeton learns “vital insights” about applicants, and the interviews perform an “ambassadorial function,” even for those not admitted.

The first function would be valuable if, on the medical school model, applicants with a strong chance of admission were interviewed. Gaining an interview would be an achievement by itself, the results would really matter, and thousands of students would be spared the time and anxiety of an interview that cannot lead to admission.

As for the ambassadorial function, must it be stated that these students have already applied to Princeton? Alumni could be ambassadors for Princeton, and for higher education itself, by speaking to ninth-through-eleventh graders. Send us to the hundreds of schools admissions officers cannot visit, to schools where many students would be the first in their families to go to college. Let us speak to them about Princeton, surely, but especially about trying to go to college at all. Princeton talks a good game about seeking gifted students from difficult or neglected backgrounds. Why are alumni not inserted when and where college aspirations are formed? 

Princeton should stop patting itself on the back for its open interview policy, which rests on the unstated assumption that there is nothing better that alumni could be asked to do with their time. There are better things for us to do, if the admissions office is willing to look for them.

Howie Slomka ’90

5 Months Ago

I visited Princeton in fall of 1985 after having already submitted my early action application. As a magician and juggler, my essays were no doubt filled with mentions of such feats. After my campus tour, I attended my live interview with an admissions dean. All went well, but as we were wrapping up, she sighed and half mockingly said, “We really don’t know if you can really juggle or not.”

I quickly picked up her paperweight, a stuffed tiger, and long letter opener. The rest is history!

Jon Holman ’66

5 Months Ago

When I applied to Princeton in 1962 there were pterodactyls in the air, both over Princeton and San Juan, Puerto Rico, where my family had moved when I was 5. No college counselor, no SAT consultants, no Princetonians to interview me, no money to go visit the campus. I wanted to be a math major (came to my senses later) and it was either Princeton or MIT in my mind.

I got into Princeton, didn’t get into MIT. Good luck for me on both counts. I arrived on campus in September 1962 knowing exactly no one and never having been there before. I found three wonderful roommates who still are close friends to this day.

William E. Holmer ’68

5 Months Ago

In my senior year at South Salem High School in Salem, Oregon, I applied for admission to Princeton, Amherst, and Dartmouth. Dartmouth said “no,” and Princeton and Amherst put me on their wait lists. Then Amherst told me they weren’t taking any more students from their wait list. Several weeks later, I was sitting in Spanish class, when I was told to go to the counselor’s office because she had a copy of a telegram addressed to me which stated “PLEASED TO INFORM YOU OF ADMISSION TO PRINCETON.  STOP.  LETTER TO FOLLOW.  STOP.”

Howard Wainer *68

5 Months Ago

I applied to graduate school at Princeton, aiming for a bridge program between psychology and mathematics. On April 1, 1965, I received two envelopes with Princeton return addresses. The first was a letter from Harold Gulliksen, professor in the psychology department and director of the psychometric program, telling me that I had been awarded an ETS Psychometric Fellowship that would cover all of my expenses in attending Princeton, conditioned, of course, on my being accepted by the University. Then I opened the second envelope that was the University telling me that I had been put on the wait list for acceptance.

I sighed and began to make plans to respond to an offer that had previously been my second choice. But for a week I did nothing. Then I received a phone call from Professor Gulliksen. He explained that I was his first choice, but if I was not going to accept the fellowship, he would like to know as soon as possible so that he could inform the first alternate. I told him that while I would very much like to have accepted, I had been wait-listed by the University. He seemed surprised and asked me to wait by the phone. I did and 15 minutes later he called back and said, “You’ve been accepted. Will you come?” I said, “Yes” and it turned out to be perhaps the best decisions I ever made. With a fortnight I received a letter from the University confirming my acceptance. It too was dated April 1, 1965.

Ed Overtree ’66

5 Months Ago

The Princeton admission office sent someone to my high school, who interviewed me and said Princeton would admit me if I agreed by letter. No application form that I remember. No essay either.

Harvard and Yale did the same thing but refused to skip the application form.

My father said agree by letter with Princeton because though located in the East — uggh — Princeton had the fewest crazy Easterners because they took a lot of Southerners. 

After going to Harvard Law School, I think he was largely correct.

I did have to be interviewed by an alumnus, a lawyer in an imposing office in downtown Cincinnati. I can’t remember his name, but I remember being very awed and nervous until I discovered he was not a snob.

H. Clay McEldowney ’69

5 Months Ago

I applied to Princeton in 1965 and graduated in 1969. At the time I applied, I had one teacher who had gone to Princeton and who I asked to write a letter of support. 

I remember agonizing over the essay that I prepared as a part of the application. I had no help from my parents or any instructors, so the essay reasonably reflected my writing ability and the subject of what I thought Princeton would want to learn about. 

I was a legacy admit, following my grandfather, Class of 1914, and father, Class of 1940. I also knew that I wanted to study civil engineering at Princeton. I emphasized both qualities in my application.

A part of my application was my interest in continuing in my sport, and I initiated contacting the wrestling coaches at the three schools that I applied to, Lehigh, Cornell, and Princeton, rather than submit applications to a myriad of schools hoping to get in to at least one of them. Fortunately, I had a choice of the three schools and I’m happy that I chose Princeton.

I might add that I think being a legacy admit served Princeton and me well in continuing my substantial interest in Princeton since my undergraduate days, including serving as reunion chairman for this year (55th), grad board of TI, schools committee, board member and chairman of the friends of Princeton wrestling, and ’69 PICS.

Norman Ravitch *62

5 Months Ago

Applicants to the Graduate School don’t have to go through this nonsense. In my day, we would-be grad students filled out all the applications, never saw an interviewer, and relied on our sponsoring professors to get us accepted.

George Chang ’63

5 Months Ago

In December 1962 I had the privilege of an interview with the late Joe Bolster ’52.

Dad and I had ridden a Greyhound bus for three days and nights to get to Princeton for the interview. At the end of our interview, Mr. Bolster asked, “Do you have any questions about Princeton?”

I asked, “How is the fishing at Princeton?” (I was crazy about fishing, even in the deserts of New Mexico.)

Mr. Bolster was surprised at the question, and he fumbled for an answer. But he didn’t need any answer at all. I had fallen in love with Princeton from the moment we arrived on campus.

I am sure that my Princeton interview has influenced my own interviewing. (I have spent nearly five decades interviewing candidates for the UC Berkeley Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholarships.)

Over the years I have usually opened the interview with a brief overview of how I’ll report the interview. I say, “I imagine that I’m writing a letter to my mother to tell her about meeting some terrific students ...”

Early in the interview I often ask, “Tell me about your trip to Berkeley today,” or “Tell me about your hometown.” (I love traveling and wish that I could know more about every hometown.)

We don’t have to tell students about their odds of admission to UC Berkeley. Each student we interview has already been admitted. But I do make a general comment about admissions. “Chances are that you will be admitted to a number of very good places,” I say. “But I do hope that you’ll give Berkeley serious consideration.”

And as I report on each interview, I ask myself, “How will this person make UC Berkeley a better place?” The PAW article has covered each of these points very well. But I thought that I’d just share my own experience.

Cecile Zorach *76

6 Months Ago

Thanks for your informative and judicious article about the perseverance of alumni interviews at Princeton. Having loved my four years as a grad student there, I was happy to join the Princeton Schools Committee in my home town. Even though I experienced the University only as a graduate student, I had exposure to undergraduate life as a teaching assistant and as a beneficiary of the many undergraduate activities. Having interviewed prospective students at the institution where I taught, I took pleasure in learning about these young people — their interests and talents, their dreams and expectations. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting all the candidates for admission to Princeton. After eight years, however, I was ready to quit.

The sentence, “But for some it was hard getting used to long dry spells of writing glowing reports on students without any being admitted,” resonated with me. After meeting dozens of energetic, hard-working high school students and seeing only one ever accepted (a delightful 16-year-old who turned down Princeton, Harvard, and MIT to go to Cal Tech), I wrote our local Princeton Schools Committee that these interviews had seemed a dispiriting waste of time for both me and for the many talented, smart young people applying. The low percentage of acceptances in Lancaster County suggested to me that the system and culture of elite institutions placed our young people at a disadvantage. Almost none of the ones I interviewed had access to tutorials preparing them for top SAT scores, school counselors helping them craft jazzy application essays, or the parental resources to pay for private counselors or for summer enrichment programs enhancing their academic or service profiles; many of them worked 10 to 20 hours a week after school and many more hours in the summer. 

Although I always looked forward to speaking with the applicants — and many of them wrote me lovely thank-you notes for a good conversation — I considered it dishonest for me to pretend further that any of them had a chance of being accepted to Princeton.  

Chuck Bethel ’68

5 Months Ago

Cecile’s experience echoes mine precisely, except that my patience ran out long before hers did. My students were from Maryland’s Eastern Shore (also a backwater from Princeton’s perspective). I had only one interviewee who was admitted — and she was almost a parody of the modern successful PU applicant, right down to the 20-page illustrated resume/life history that she proffered (and she went elsewhere). I still remember my two lowest points. One was meeting a sterling young woman who had raced to our appointment after driving from her grandmother’s funeral out of state. She was emotionally devastated. I took off my interviewer’s hat and just sat in conversation with her. But I felt terribly guilty that she was giving this moment in her life to a likely meaningless interview.

The second experience came when an applicant, whose parents were immigrants, requested that our conversation take place at his home. When I arrived he and his father greeted me, and the father implored me to have some of the food he had set out and hovered nearby with barely concealed hope and anxiety. I knew within five minutes that the student would never be admitted. Was I proud to be an “ambassador” from Princeton at that moment? No.

It’s not just that alumni time could be better used elsewhere, it’s that the admissions office seems not to understand that for tens of thousands of applicants the experience is stressful, takes precious time to prepare for, and fosters the impression that being interviewed indicates real interest on Princeton’s part. As I indicated in my own letter in this group, I’d be happy to interview on the medical school model. If the admissions office would narrow the field to the strongest candidates (which they have to do anyway!) then the interviews collectively would mean something. As it is, this is a Princeton tradition that makes less and less sense the larger the number of applicants grows.

Murphy Sewall ’64

6 Months Ago

I don’t remember how many years I’ve participated as an alumni interview, more than a decade or two. Frankly, after meeting so many outstanding young people who were not admitted, I find the role humbling.

I have interviewed three students over the years who were accepted. Alumni interviewers have zero access to the content of students’ admission files; so, we have no way to really know how those that were accepted differ from those who were denied. However, I do generally look into the general reputations of the applicants secondary schools, and I have seen evidence that acceptance rates differ noticeably by what school they attend.

I do not envy the task of the admissions office faced with having to select a handful from among a tsunami of qualified applicants. It seems an impossible task, but I’m a regular attendee of major reunions that provide opportunities to interact with Princeton undergraduates. I have always been impressed by Princeton students both individually and collectively. Nevertheless, I suspect that applicants who have access to and resources for coaching and counseling have an advantage that I believe is a superficial difference that the Admissions Office doesn’t fully account for. I intend to keep interviewing and advocating for applicants from ordinary public high schools.

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