Education & Opportunity

I've already been getting a lot of questions about my Feb. 15 newspaper column on how to ace a college admission, scholarship, or job interview. In particular, a lot of folks have been asking for sample questions that might help students better prepare. So here's a list of practice interview questions to get you started:

General Questions

How would you describe yourself?
Where do you see yourself in 20 years?
What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?
What is your favorite book, and why do you like it?
Who is someone you admire, and why?
How would you like to be remembered?
What has been your greatest accomplishment?
What was an occasion when you overcame adversity?
What is your family like?
How might you contribute to society in the future?

In my Jan. 11 newspaper column, I discuss three key strategies for getting great recommendation letters.

Mary, a reader from Beaverton, Oregon, asks if there are any advantages to first obtaining recommendation letters for scholarship applications and then recycling them for later use on your college applications.

The answer: Absolutely!

Developing a menu of scholarship recommendation letters becomes a big advantage for students who have not yet applied to college. Unlike submission guidelines for most scholarship recommendation letters (in which recommendations are generally submitted with the rest of the application materials), many college applications specify that recommendation letters be mailed separately by the recommendation writers. This decreases your chances of being able to read them before they are sent off.

In my Nov. 30 newspaper column, I showed you how to write a college admissions and scholarship essay that really stinks. Hopefully, all of you avoided those pesky essay mistakes I described. Here's one more big mistake to avoid: the "multi-topic combo meal."

When you are trying to show your thoughtfulness, creativity, and eloquence all in one essay, choosing a primary topic on which to focus can be difficult. As a result, many applicants don’t make this decision at all; they just lump together all of their thoughts on the topic like a stew made from incompatible leftovers. The result is usually a fragmented essay of incomplete, incoherent arguments--in other words, a confusing jumble of unpalatable ideas.

Combat this problem by forcing yourself to make the tough decisions. If the question asks, for example, about something meaningful in your life, don’t write a 300-word essay that includes the birth of your baby brother, winning the state swimming meet, and attending your grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Each of these could be a solid topic, but combining all of them together would only detract from the weight of your words and the image or emotion you are striving to evoke.

My column for Nov. 9 focused on the college application process as an opportunity for tremendous personal growth and change in the student. This was certainly the case for me. What college and scholarship applications taught me to do was to believe in myself and to also persuade others to believe in me, too.

That's a skill that proves useful in virtually every aspect of life--whether it means getting that great internship in college, securing your first job, or rallying the support of your peers and colleagues. I don't know if I would have had the courage to write and self-publish my first book, How to Go to College Almost for Free, if I hadn't learned such skills from my college and scholarship applications. There are now more than 250,000 copies of my first book in print and it all goes back to the lessons I learned from the college admissions and scholarship process.