Tip 4: Show Them Your Love of Learning

One accomplishment I recommend you strive for in any admission interview is to help the interviewer see the role that learning plays in your life. The most effective way to do this is to share a few personal stories, experiences, and perspectives that illustrate your love of learning. 

It's worth spending the time to assemble, evaluate, and select this material before your interview. 

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One Way to Gather Personal Material

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When you’re ready to gather your material, create a document to hold it. Divide it into three sections that correspond to the topics that admission interviews usually cover: (1) academics, (2) outside the classroom, and (3) community. In this step, you'll focus on the first section.

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Spend ten minutes a day collecting personal material that demonstrates your love of learning. Do this every day for a week. Put a reminder and an alert in your phone to do it. And be ready to capture the great ideas that pop up when you’re doing something else.

When you identify a memory, anecdote, story, observation, perspective, or other personal item that might help your interviewer see your intellectual curiosity, capture it in this document. No need to write down the full story; just jot down a brief note that’ll help you remember it, for example: “Our AP Physics study group’s breakthrough,” “How my favorite book shaped my perspective on gender,” or “How history taught me the value of working with my friends in my classes.”

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At the end of the week, review what you’ve collected. Highlight any items that illustrate both (1) an important element of your life as a student and (2) your ability to contribute to a community. (The ones that meet the latter criterion will demonstrate attributes like your thirst for new experiences, openness to new perspectives, empathy, curiosity, creativity, communication skills, and ability to connect with others.) Give the highlighted items a close look; they may be some of the most effective to share in your interview.

Review all of the items on your list and pick the three that you believe will best help the interviewer see your love of learning. Be prepared to share them during your interview.

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General Advice as you Gather Personal Material

As you search for content, remember: your objective is to demonstrate your love of learning, not to recite facts and details you’ve learned. Focus on the stories and perspectives and why they matter to you. Skip the details and data. Later, when you’re in the interview, resist the temptation to share your GPA, SAT, AP, and other scores (unless the interviewer asks explicitly). Instead of “I got a 5 on my AP Physics exam,” tell the interviewer: 

• How you struggled to learn something challenging that later became your favorite subject

• What a learning experience taught you about the value of learning in general or about your learning style in particular

• What fascinates you about an academic topic

• How you and your friends studied together, combined your different strengths, and helped one another succeed

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Collaborative learning experiences are valuable to share in these interviews, so look for stories that demonstrate your ability to support and learn from peers and friends:

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• How has your friends’ quest for knowledge intersected with, informed, or enriched your own? 

• How do you and your peers support each other as students? What is your learning community and how has it shaped your journey as a learner? 

• Tell the interviewer about a time when another student helped you learn something of academic or personal value.

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Also: demonstrate the range of your academic interests. Tell stories about your experience in and love of fields that vary from one another: science and literature, math and history, music and computer science.

If You Get Stuck 

Explore:

• Your admission essays and the materials you created as you wrote them. If you created a verbal sketch and gathered illustrations of that sketch, they may contain excellent material to share in admission interviews.

• The ideas, topics, books, and fields of study that fascinate you most. What fascinates you about your favorite topics? What do they mean to you? How are you different today because you’ve explored them deeply?

• A time when you became absorbed in a learning endeavor. What did you learn? How did it enrich your perspective? When did you realize you had become engrossed? What does it look like to others when you’re learning something that captivates your attention? How does it feel to you? 

• Something that was challenging to learn. How did you address that challenge? What did you learn about yourself? How are you different today?

• A project you undertook with peers. What did you learn from your peers? From the experience? How has this changed your approach or informed your perspective on something that matters to you? 

• Your favorite book. What did you love about it? How is your life different today because of it?

• A valuable academic experience with people from backgrounds different from yours. What did you take away from it? How did the experience change you?

• Your favorite class or teacher. What did you learn? How did you grow? How did it affect your perspective on learning?

Collect anecdotes and stories that will help the interviewer understand what these topics mean to you. Share what surprised you, stayed with you, changed you, helped you grow, and the things that have mattered most to you in your rich, rewarding journey as a learner.