Interviews

I didn't know how much I could trust the Boston transit system, so I played it safe and arrived at the hotel an hour and a half early. The instructions emphasized that the interviewers work on a very tight schedule, so get there early and phone the interviewer 5 to 10 minutes before your scheduled interview time. At 10:20 am I picked up the hotel phone and asked to be connected to the interviewer's hotel room.

He checked out yesterday, I was told.

That can't be. He's supposed to meet me now. Could you please connect me to his room? 

No, someone else has already taken that room.

I began to panic. I was a 20-year-old college senior who had been nominated by Harvard for a graduate fellowship for people who wanted to become college educators. I had made it to the final round, which consisted of the interview. Even though I had arrived absurdly early, I was going to either miss the interview completely, or at best show up late and flustered.

Suddenly, I remembered that a friend had told me about his interview with the same interviewer a day or so earlier. He helpfully described the experience in detail, down to the actual four digit hotel room where his interview took place. It was an odd piece of data to include in his report. Even odder was that I remembered it.

Hoping my memory was correct, but strongly doubting it, I hopped on an elevator, took it the appropriate floor, knocked on the door of the hotel room, and held my breath as I waited for a response.

Eventually, a man opened the door. He was surprised to see me there. All the other interviewees had called on the hotel phone. I explained what had happened when I tried to phone, and how I knew his room number. He phoned the front desk, and learned that they had confused him with another guest who had checked out.

His hotel room was taken up by two large beds that were perhaps a foot apart. He sat down on one of them, and motioned for me to sit across from him on the other bed. Our knees were almost touching.

What I remember most about the interview, more than 40 years later, was the interviewer constantly rubbing his thighs up and down with his hands. 

The only thing I remember about our discussion was that we had different ideas about the meaning of the ethical part of the fellowship criteria. Since it was a fellowship for future educators, I tried to steer the discussion to my views on ethics in pedagogy and education. My recollection is that the interviewer equated ethics with religion, and pressed me for my religious views. That's something I consider completely private, and not something I share with strangers. The New York City public schools had impressed on me the separation of church and state, which I had subconsciously extrapolated to a wall between religion on the one hand, and one's schooling and career on the other. The interviewer wanted to breach that wall. Further, I remembered my parents' belief that someone we knew didn't get into Harvard/Radcliffe because of her answer to a question her interviewer asked about her ancestry (my parents interpreted it as anti-semitism), so I was wary of interview questions about religion.

Sitting close together on beds while the interviewer rubbed his thighs didn't feel right to me. When I was asked afterwards to send feedback on my interview, I wanted to tell them that. But I didn't want to hurt my chances of getting a fellowship, and it felt too creepy and embarrassing to tell them about the beds. Instead, I briefly told them about the hotel room mixup and made suggestions to prevent that from happening to future applicants. I also praised the interviewer for being well prepared and well organized, but added that I thought that the interviewer's definition of moral and ethical values was more "political" than mine, so we didn't communicate well on that subject. Religion and sex felt like hot potatoes that I didn't want to touch in my comments.

I didn't get the fellowship. We were told that no information would be given to us about the reasons, so I don't know which parts of the interview I failed. As best I can tell, the winners were all at least as well qualified as I was, so I don't have a complaint about the decision.

But whenever anyone says that a woman who goes to a man's hotel room, especially a stranger's, is "asking for it", I think of that interview.

I was glad to see that Harvard now tells alumni interviewers to meet prospective students in neutral places such as coffee shops, rather than in their homes (or on beds in hotel rooms).

I remember my interview for an Ivy League college I'll call Ivory Tower, when I was a 16-year-old high school senior. It was in the New York City apartment of an alumnus I'll call Prince Charming, since he was quite handsome. Mr. Charming very kindly made me a cup of tea with honey, since I arrived on his doorstep with a very bad cold. Who goes to an interview with a cold? If an interviewee did that to me now, I'd recommend rejection based on atrocious judgment.

After I got accepted to Ivory Tower (have they no standards?), I went to the party that was intended to convince accepted students to enroll. Another student (let's call her Jane) and I had great fun playing ping pong with Mr. Charming. Jane's interview with Charming had been at his office. She teased me about having had my interview at his home, and claimed he was flirting with me. That seemed like total nonsense. In any case, Charming was way too old to be interested in us. Only later did I wonder whether Charming did something at Jane's interview that led her to think he was interested in her.

Jane and I turned down Ivory Tower and went to Harvard. In our first week, Jane told me that Charming was now the boyfriend of someone in Jane's dorm, whom I'll call Snow White. I never found out whether they met at an interview or some other way. But Jane was right that Charming was interested in dating someone our age. Snow and Prince married right after she graduated, and lived happily ever after (according to her reports in the alumni news).