esrosedotblog

DEARTH

I am the Educational Counsellor for MIT in eastern Riverside County, California.

That means that I am available to interview every applicant to MIT from my area. The interview is optional but they are highly advised to have one. A huge majority of acceptances are people who had interviews as part of their admission process.

Last year, I had 56 applicants and conducted 16 interviews. One student was accepted. He interviewed with me. I was able to follow along with him through the next steps up to his first day of the first term. It was nice.

Actually, all of the experience is nice.

This year, unaccountably, I have only 21 applicants with only a few who actually completed their first application phase. I have given one interview.

That one was today.

We are at the end of the period for interviews. Their last day to make an appointment was two days ago. There were/are two stragglers who say they want an interview but have not made arrangements yet. I am not too sympathetic with this kind of foot dragging and I always comment on it in my report.

A few more days and they will probably be better off not having an interview as they are running the risk of pissing me off.

So.

I have gone through some wonder about what has happened. There are several schools who have "always" sent some applications to the Institute and they are not even represented on the panel I have assigned to me. I thought perhaps they had set up another EC in my territory but my nominal "boss" tells me that is not the case.

So it is a puzzlement.

The interview today was fun though.

We got through it pretty well and I told the kid that I was done and asked if he had anything else.

He said yes and took out a pack of cards, regular cards as far as I could tell, and proceeded to do some table top card tricks.

His patter needs some work but the tricks are pretty amazing.

This has never happened before, a grand finale.

It certainly will earn him some points with me.

Then we walked to the 1983 Mercedes sedan that he has restored before he even had a drivers license. 1983, a classic. And he and his Dad have traveled cross country four times in it.

Another first. A show and tell interview.

I thoroughly enjoyed the session.

So if this is the only one I am going to have it is a brilliant one and well worth my time and energy.

I don't know if the stragglers will show up or not. They have until January 9th to get to me and set up a date. But I am running out of time.

And, as I said, I might get pissed off. If that happens, even card tricks won't save their straggly little asses. Such sloppiness shouldn't attend MIT anyway.

Labels: MIT