I've been getting a lot of good questions lately about the college admissions process, so keep them coming!

One question that I answered previously was on interviewing. I really want to stress two important points about college interviews.

1. Unless the college or the program explicitly says that getting an interview indicates that you were selected to the next round of admissions, absolutely DO NOT WORRY about not getting one.

2. Different colleges have different deadlines for submitting your information to get an interview. Some colleges need your information to offer you an interview as early as October (example: Washington University in St. Louis) while some will offer everyone that applies an interview (example: Harvard and a lot of the other Ivies). Make sure you keep track of these deadlines because they will fly by fast!

My personal experience:

If you go to my colleges page, you can see that I was not offered an interview for every college that I was accepted to and to add to that, I even got into two prestigious programs (University of Pennsylvania Dual Degree Program in Management and Life Sciences and Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering Program) without ever interviewing. Did I think at that time as soon as I wasn't offered an interview that I didn't have a chance? Yes, but I took the time to email the Admissions Offices of the colleges that hadn't offered me an interview in February/March and asked if it would have any effect on the decisions process. All of them said no, but of course I didn't believe them. Now, that I look back on it, the admissions officers really did mean no.

Also, I didn't get interviews with some schools because I submitted my information requesting an interview to the college really late. This was the case with Washington University in St. Louis, Rice, and Johns Hopkins primarily because they didn't have enough alumni interviewers and interviews are given on a first come, first served basis.

It is important to create the list of schools that you are going to apply to in the summer after Junior year so that you have adequate time to look at the deadlines to fill out basic information forms that really just ask the basics, such as name, high school, and contact information.