When is it recommended to request an interview?

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Jerome A. Cole, MA
Director of College Counseling, The Edmund Burke School
coleecs.googlepages.com/home  
(301) 625-5066

Jerome A. Cole, M.A., is the Director of College Counseling for the Edmund Burke school in Washington, D.C. and the founder of Cole Educational Consulting Services (Cole ECS.) He has worked with students and families for over seven years to help them plan and strategize for college. As a college counselor at Burke, an independent college preparatory high school founded in 1968, Mr. Cole oversees a program that is designed to support students and families as they go through the selection and admission process for college. Mr. Cole advises over 100 students each year in a small academically challenging environment where every senior is expected to apply to and enroll in college. Prior to Burke, he was a school counselor at Bethesda-Chevy Chase high school in Montgomery County, Maryland. He has successfully counseled hundreds of students and helped them prepare for admission to a variety of schools such as: American University, Clark-Atlanta University, Davidson College, George Washington University, Harvard University, Pitzer College, Stanford University, Temple University, and the University of Maryland at College Park, to highlight just a few. He established the consulting firm Cole ECS to provide students and families with the necessary information and support to make the best choice for college. Cole ECS defines the best choice as the optimal learning and social environment to ensure a student’s holistic success, culminating in on-time or early graduation and desirable post-graduate options. Mr. Cole earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Catholic University, and then went on to obtain a Master of Arts in Education and Human Development from George Washington University. He is certified as a school counselor and is a member of the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC).

When is it recommended to request an interview?

In this video, Jerome Cole tells you everything you need to know to complete the perfect college application and have a great college interview.

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Speaker: When is it recommended to request an interview?

Jerome Cole: I think there are probably a few situations where you want to actually go to a school if they do not require an interview and ask that you come on campus and sit down and speak with someone in the Admission's Office for an interview. I think when you have a situation where may be a student has some learning challenges that they want to share with the college; they want to talk about the accommodations that they are going to need. That is important information that you can put in your application, but it also is probably going to be to your benefit and also the college's benefit that you go and speak with someone directly one-on-one. So, I think in that situation it is probably appropriate. If in fact, there have been some discipline problems, maybe you have some encounters with the law and you want to come and explain exactly what happened. You are going to have to provide that on your application, but again you might want to sit down with someone in the Admission's Office and in the interview setting and actually explain your 1:02 so that there is a complete understanding of exactly what happened and what you have done as a result. So, those are just two that immediately come to mind, but I guess the general rule that I would say that students and family should apply is that if you have information that you would like to share with a college and you do not believe that you can adequately do that in the application, then you should request an interview.

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