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Tonight was the merit scholar dinner. All of us in the engineering school who have WashU scholarships are treated to a free meal and then afterward are recruited to help with merit weekend, the event where the engineering school invites 14 high school seniors to WashU to compete for scholarships. Last year I was lucky enough to be one of the interviewers (the engineering school is evil and make all the high schools interview with six teams of three interviewers). The meal has caused me to start thinking about what questions I'll ask if I get to interview this year. Last year I went with these three questions:

1. Tell me about your school.
2. What is the best invention of the last 100 years?
3. What is your favorite TV show?

I was pretty disappointed by the responses I got to these questions. The first one was an ice breaker, and I wasn't really expecting any useful information to come from it, but the last two questions really let me down. One girl told me that mechanical pencils topped all inventions from the last 100 years. (It was totally coincidental that I was fidgeting with a mechanical pencil during the long time that she remained silent while peering around the interview room and thinking about an answer.) And easily half the students told me that they didn't ever watch TV and had no favorite show. That was the biggest cop-out answer ever.

So my experience last year is causing me to try to think of some new questions. Here's one Chris and I thought of last night:

What is the worst novel you had to read for a high school literature class?

As a variant we can ask about the most overrated story they had to read in high school. This question stemmed out of a discussion about the fact that interviewees almost always lie to the interviewers. If you ask them about the last book they read for pleasure, the odds are greater that it will be The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway than Big Trouble by Dave Berry. Anyway, any feedback, question ideas, or other comments would be appreciated.

Posted by on 8 February 2003 at 2:04 AM