最近又收到耶鲁校友会的email，询问这个学年是否仍然有兴趣做校友面试官。我是从上个学年开始作为校友面试官对报考耶鲁本科生院(Yale College)的考生进行面试的。在这里把我上个学年的面试经历写下来，在科学网上分享。

美国很多高校的本科生录取，有一个环节叫做“校友面试”，就是请跟考生物理距离比较近的校友对考生进行一对一的面谈，最后校友面试官要写成书面的面试报告，供招生办公室录取的时候参考。

最早知道这个校友面试，还是在国内的时候，当时有本畅销书，叫做哈佛女孩刘亦婷的，提到哈佛的录取要有校友面试这个环节，当时觉得很新鲜。没想到自己某一天也会参与这个环节。但是差不多两年前，偶然的机会认识了一个距离非常近的耶鲁化工系系友，耶鲁的化工系是非常小的，每年招的本科生和研究生加起来10个左右，所以顿时觉得十分亲近。就是这位校友说，他已经参加耶鲁的校友面试十多年了，并鼓励我和太太也参加，于是我们也与校友会和招办联系，很快，也就成为了校友面试官。

最早作为面试官对考生进行面试是今年年初，招办的同志们给我分配了三名考生，要求我对他们进行面试，要写出详细的面试报告并打分。打分是从1分到9分，原则上所有考生（不是所有录取学生）的平均分应该在5左右，当然每个具体考生的情况由面试官自行掌握。我面试的三个考生，最后分别给了5、6、7分。

闲话已经说了很多，这里贴出我给7分考生写的面试报告，共大家参考。姓名已隐去

AB is a strong candidate. He is an intelligent, mature, passionate yet well-mannered and humble young man with leadership and dedication. He described himself as “both stereotypical and atypical as an Asian male”. He is involved in Ridge High’s debate team and some sports teams, and served as manager of one sports team although he is not among the best players. He has been doing research in a physiology lab in a clinic for four years, and participated in many math/science clubs/competitions. He is also devoted to community service. He is the co-founder of the local club of SHARE in Africa, a non-profit organization empowering the awareness of girls’ education in Africa, and he also participated some charity work on cancer support. “The atypical part,” he said, “is I really like baking.” And we both laughed at this point.

AB has a clear career goal. He is determined to become a physician with expertise in physiology and cardiology. His initial idea of medical career was influenced by his cousin’s early death (due to a cardio failure) when he was in middle school. The work experience in the physiology lab in a cardiology clinic further strengthened his determination. He believes a successful medical career requires three aspects: scientific research, careful analysis and judgment, and patient interaction. He has experienced all three aspects during his work with the cardio clinic. He went to the clinic every summer and worked on some cardiology research projects using animals, which led to two scientific papers currently under review process. He was able to accurately describe the research objective, research methodology, experimental procedure, as well as his own contribution, in a layman’s word. During his school days he is having a very helpful practice with the physician in the cardio clinic. The physician would send him patients’ lab results, ask him to read and comment, and give him feedback via email. Such experience gave him the insights for a medical career, and also well prepared him with great analytical thinking capability for his further study. He showed great passion hen talking about this experience. He used the word “fascination” several times and he was really fascinated about how scientific instruments and scientific discoveries can change people’s lives.

He also had some emergency room experience when working in the clinic. When a trauma patient was sent to ER, although he was not able to physically help, his words and his calmness really helped the patient (who was also a teenager) to calm down and get ready for medical treatment. From this experience he learned the importance of people interaction in a medical career, and is well-prepared for that. He was also able to connect his debate experience with his passion for a medical career. He believed that what he gained from the debate experience, including literature research, analytical thinking, as well as working under a time-sensitive environment (limited time to win in debate competition vs limited time to cure in ER), would all help his medical career in the future.

I felt he was well-prepared to talk about his experience with the cardio clinic, debate team and community service, so I decided to test him with something else. I asked him to talk about his summer experiences. He mentioned that he participated in New Jersey Governor’s School of Science last year, in which he took some college course and did a research project (in a team setting) on diffusion of molecules in polymer membranes. I further asked him some details of the research. Apparently, he was not prepared for this question so this is a good test for him. He forgot the names of a couple of chemicals but he could describe the properties of the chemicals, which showed that he really understands the project. He was able to tell the details of the research, and more importantly, he could comment on the applicability and the limitations of the assumptions they used when doing the research. He also talked about some estimation the team did, and suggested some more accurate experiments to reduce the error of estimation if they were better equipped and given more time. The whole story shined his research maturity, which is very rare for high school students, even college students.

When asked about a difficult time, he talked about a scientific Olympic competition he participated. His team was asked to design a “roller-coaster-like” mechanical device that can perform several functions within a given time. When the team was stuck in the middle of the competition and could not make any progress, he was able to figure out the solution. He pointed out that the project task gave a clear definition of a “roller-coaster-like” device, but the team’s thinking was confined by the appearance of a normal roller coaster in theme parks. He was able to convince the team in the last hour that they could make something that does not look like a roller coaster, but still meets the requirement of the project objective. Although his team did not win the competition (ranked 5 out of 30, not bad) because they did not figure out the right way until the last hour so that they did not have enough time to work out something perfectly, AB showed critical out-of-box thinking and project leadership in this case, both very critical for his future success.

Overall I believe AB is a very strong candidate, especially in research. Being a R&D professional, I have been coaching/mentoring high school researchers, starting when I was a graduate student at Yale and followed by my current company’s research outreach program. I have coached 4 high school students over the years, who got admitted by Yale, MIT, Columbia and Cornell, respectively, for their academic/research excellence. AB excels all 4 of them in terms of independent critical thinking, maturity in research methodology, and scientific curiosity. His research maturity is even comparable with, if not better than, the average of Yale undergraduate students I worked with. I highly recommend his admission.