(Rhodes) Scholarship Interview Advice

So you have been selected to be interviewed for a selective scholarship. Off the bat, congrats on making it this far. The process is grim and stressful. I hope you have a reasonably light workload on top of that!

I also want to say if you win this, do something good with it. Too many people win a Rhodes/Marshall/other fellowship and go into finance or consulting. That’s such a waste, especially considering how many people apply wanting to do good work aimed at helping people. And if you don’t win, know that that is not a reflection on you. It’s a reflection of the complex politics of the committee, the kind of class they want to build, their personal biases against and resonances with candidates. These are considerations far out of your control. Which sucks. All you can really do is prep the best you can and hope that you’re what they’re looking for. To give you a sense I also applied for the Marshall, and didn’t even get an interview. Obviously I will therefore focus on the Rhodes Scholarship here, but I think the advice is broadly applicable.

Ok, that out of the way let’s get into it. I’m organizing this in roughly descending order of granularity, so general stuff at the top, then some more detailed prep advice, then some nitty-gritty thoughts on doing the interview, then my interview questions.

High Level

So, my most important piece of high-level advice: have a clear sense of what you wanna do and why. The hardest question I got asked, one that really threw me in a practice interview was: if you received 10 million dollars to work on whatever you want, what would you do with it? I think this question is really sharp. It gets at a key point that is often undiscussed, namely no one applies for the Rhodes Scholarship just because they want to go to Oxford. You apply for the status and opportunity. This question is really about that. Winning the scholarship is like winning a ticket to work on whatever you want. What does that look like?

You need a clear idea of where you’re going, but you also want to have a narrative about how everything you’ve done so far brings you, almost inevitably, to that end point. This is how I think about a lot of applications. You need a story that unifies what you’ve done so far with what you’re going to do, and you need to make clear why the thing you’re applying for — in this case a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University — is essential to getting you from where you are now to where you want to go. That means your story needs to explain why Oxford is a key steppingstone.

The rough thing here is you really need to imagine yourself winning the Rhodes and going to Oxford to develop this narrative, which I know is painful if you don’t win and don’t go.

I remember reading that advice, that you need to really put yourself in the mindset of going, and thinking “god that sucks” and, like, it does suck.

General Prep

In my experience, as you’ll see, questions hewed close to my CV and statement. I think a good first step is to reread those and make sure you’ve got some response for anything on there (DSA was one line at the very bottom of my CV). It’s really helpful to have a short, clear, and non-technical explanation for any work/research you’ve mentioned anywhere in the application. I also started listening to a bunch of podcasts about UK politics and was prepared to discuss e.g., devolution, but none of that came up. The only “current affairs” questions I got were pretty deeply connected to my background.

The bulk of my time in prep was practice interviews — 6 for the week before my interview — with a ton of different people. I think these were super helpful, in part because I really tried to maintain as much fidelity to the real thing as possible. I’d send them all my materials and they’d write questions, and we’d practice, timed. The people who helped me practice really are as much the reason I won as anything else. They dedicated a really crazy amount of time to helping me, reading my materials, writing their own creative questions, and then interviewing me. By the end I felt incredibly comfortable. You learn to answer questions on the fly, but you also develop a clear sense of what stories you can tell to convey a particular point, and you practice telling those stories over and over.

Possibly too detailed

The timing is killer. It's too short — usually it’s about 20 minutes. You need to have concise answers. A lot of advice I read said it was “ok to take a minute to collect your thoughts” — that is absolutely true, but I am going to go even further: you also need to speak slowly and pause before answering.

The time pressure will make you talk too fast, and you’ll be harder to understand, your responses sound less considered, your ideas less profound (silly as this seems it’s true!). Slowing down was probably the best advice I got. The only way to practice this is to practice it with someone else listening. Even if you aren’t partial to practice interviews, I really really recommend having someone pay attention to your manner of speech to help you tune your speed.

Additionally, take a minute to collect your thoughts or to appear to collect your thoughts even if you don’t need it. Especially if you practice a lot, you may have answers ready as soon as you hear a question, but pausing will help your timing and give the impression you are considering things, even if an answer immediately jumps to mind. In practice interviews where I answered too quickly, I came off like an asshole, like I wasn’t taking the question seriously, whereas pausing before giving a nearly identical answer gave the impression of a considerate person doing their best to give a good answer.

My interview

I am not going to give any advice or details about the cocktail party because I was interviewed during COVID, so it was online, and the procedures differed wildly for each region. Suffice to say it was awful and nothing like an organic cocktail party.

Some relevant background: I was a CS+Sociology major, with research in ML+genomics and inequality. My honors thesis was on the history of plea bargaining. I built the technical infrastructure for a polling firm starting sophomore year and was involved in a few 2020 election initiatives. I was applying for two masters, one in Statistics and the other in History of Science. It was the end of 2020 with COVID in full swing and everything online, only a few days after the election of Joe Biden.

I was in the DC/MD region. There were 16 finalists and 7 panelists. Because we were online my year my interview went very long, almost double the usual length.

Panelists

  • Don Graham — Former owner of the Washington Post, running the meeting
  • Darryl Banks — Biochemist, Secretary
  • Elizabeth Cousens — CEO of United Nations Foundation
  • Miriam Ticktin — Medical Anthropology Prof. at the New School
  • James Adams — English Prof. at Columbia University
  • Nancy Levenson — Space Telescope Science Institute
  • Caroline Huang — A former NIH bioethicist then at FDA

1:52 pm start

  • Levenson: Do you have a favorite “machine learning” technique?
    (I said you use what’s right for the job, which led to the follow up.)
    Levenson: What’s an example of machine learning, how it works, and what you can do with it.

  • Adams: You want to “disrupt inequality rather than reinforcing it.” Why is course of study focused on history of science and technology rather than something to do with policy?
    (The quote is from my statement, but I swear I’m not like that — I was using the disrupt ironically.)

  • Adams: What is singular value decomposition — SVD?
    (This was mentioned in my statement.)

  • Banks: What are you doing when you’re doing genetic engineering trying to optimize outputs?
    Banks: So, is this good for simulating a bunch of different outputs of genetic circuits?

  • Graham: How should we handle criminal trials in America?

  • Huang: Were the polls wrong?
    Graham: Why so much split ticket voting? Turnout wouldn’t explain that.

  • Ticktin: How would you use artificial intelligence to speed up or improve the delivery of the coronavirus vaccine.

  • Levenson: Are you saying you’d maximize the number of vaccines delivered?

  • Cousens: You’ve written a lot about technology — the negatives and the positives. How would you tackle regulating those big technology companies?
    (My statement discussed tech companies at length.)

  • Ticktin: You were part of Democratic Socialists of America on campus. Why? Does that have a role in your future?
    (This was one of 6 extracurriculars listed at the very bottom of my CV.)

  • Graham: Is there anything you want to say in closing?

2:28 pm ending

Those are my thoughts! I’m sure you’ll be fine, even though reading that won’t help you feel better, I know. Read Emma’s discussion (probably below assuming they continue organizing this in a similar way in the future editions)! It was helpful to me. I also suggest you google “The Rhodes scholarship wasn't designed for my people” and read the Salon piece which was written by my friend Julian. I will also say that I am making a version of this, along with many of my other application materials, freely available online. I highly advise doing this! Otherwise, the advice and concurrent advantages continue to concentrate at top universities where scholars have tended to come from historically, reinforcing those inequalities.