On-Campus Interviews for Rising High School Seniors
We Admit It! We get pretty psyched for interview season to begin. It means each day throughout the summer, when the campus itself is quieter, we get to see hundreds of eager prospective students come through our doors excited to meet with our supremely awesome Senior Interviewers.
We’ve been very purposeful about how we craft our application interviews (which are entirely optional). First and foremost they are conducted by W&M rising seniors (not admission officers or alumni). While admission officers and alumni are great sources of information for prospective students, there’s nothing quite like sitting down one-on-one, face-to-face with a current student. The opportunity to have a current student’s undivided attention and to ask of them any question you might have is an important one. From that interaction we hope you get a sense of our campus from the student perspective which should help to discern whether W&M is the right fit for you. Second, interviews are offered only on campus. While we know this makes it difficult if not impossible for some students to take advantage of the interview opportunity (which is why again, it’s entirely optional), it also invites prospective students and families to campus. All the online research available cannot replace the power of a campus visit. Oftentimes, you only have to be on campus for a short period of time to get a vibe (good or bad) about the place and whether or not you can see yourself there. Third, we know that the required application materials provide us an abundance of information, but we know they don’t always provide the entire picture. Allowing students to show us their personality and to take themselves off the paper pages of the Common Application provides us yet another dimension on which to assess a student’s candidacy for admission.
During the summer we offer interviews to rising high school seniors on weekdays beginning June 23 and ending August 15. Registration is live and filling quickly, so we encourage interested students to register as soon as they are able. We do offer interviews for seniors in the fall on a very limited basis.
Our Senior Interviewers are excited to meet each of you, and we deans are eager to read the results of those meetings come reading season.
Wendy Livingston ’03, M.Ed. ‘09
Associate Dean of Admission
Comments are closed on posts older than one year, but we still want to hear from you. If you have a comment or question for us, please email admission@wm.edu.
Hi, I had an interview over the summer and I was wondering how the interview gets connected to an applicant’s application. Also, while in the lobby of the Office of Admission waiting to be brought back by the interviewing senior, I heard a rumor that each interviewer could guarantee acceptance to one of the applicants that they interviewed, is that true? Thank you! 🙂
@Zach, your interview is automatically connected to your application through our database. And our Interviewers help to inform our review but they are not actually members of the Committee and therefore are not part of the decision making process. They cannot guarantee admission to anyone.