Recently, I was speaking with a close friend of mine, who is an entrepreneur in Beijing. My friend, a Chinese national, went to university at Princeton and handles many of their alumni interviews in the city. He had just finished meeting with the latest round of candidates, some of whom had done very well – others less so.

“What makes for a good candidate?” I asked him.

“When they can show me they understand what college will be like.”

Everyone, he explained, has an excellent resume, good grades, and high SAT scores. In fact, Princeton does not even send that information to its interviewers, because it is taken as a given (also, determining academic merit is not the job of the interviewer, but of the admissions committee). What he wants from students is to be able to picture them in the university setting. That means that the best applicants have to have a good balance of listing accomplishments and displaying knowledge of the school.

 
One of the worst candidates that my friend interviewed was, by most measures, an excellent applicant. She had very high SAT scores, a terrific transcript, and had (at age 17) already come up with several original inventions. She looked, on paper, like exactly the type of student a university like Princeton would want.

However, in the interview itself, all she did was talk about herself and her inventions. When my friend asked her what she wanted to do at Princeton, she talked about her inventions. When he asked about her thoughts about living in America, she talked about her inventions. When he expressed concern that she hadn’t given a proper amount of thought to what it meant to go to an American university, she countered that she “worked very very hard” and then talked about her inventions. When he asked her why she wanted to go to Princeton in particular, she said “because it is very famous in China” and then talked about her inventions.

At no point in the interview did she display any knowledge of the university itself, nor did she show that she would have the social aptitude to succeed there. For my friend, it stopped being important how hard she had worked or how many things she had invented. She simply did not seem like a good fit for the school.

Another girl, with a very similar academic background, that he met with later that week had a very different result in her interview. While the first girl’s passion was invention, the second’s was astrophysics. She had led science fairs, done serious astronomical research, and been the most successful student of astrophysics in her high school. However, after listing her own accomplishments, the second applicant made the seamless transition to why she wanted to go to Princeton. She was able to list the names of all the top astronomy professors at the university, and knew about the Princeton observatory and how it compared to those of other universities. She not only showed her own talents and dedication, but demonstrated clearly how they would fit in at Princeton. She was able to show him what she would get out of her time there, and what Princeton would get by virtue of having her as a student.

The comparisons between these two are important to grasp, because the backgrounds of these two girls were not very different. Both were impressive. Both had achieved a lot. Both likely could have handled the academic workload. Only the latter, however, was able to connect her own accomplishments with a career at Princeton. Keep this in mind for your own interviews. It’s not enough to show why you are great. You need to show why you are a great fit as well.