A good interview
What follows is a repost of one of my posts to the newsgroup talk.origins. This post is from August 21, 2003 (I previously reposted another post on this blog). This post is pretty self-explanatory; just note that it was written to a specific audience at talk.origins, so you may not recognize some of the names. It has also been reposted on talkorigins.org as an Honorable Mention for Post of the Month August 2003. But I figured I might as well repost it here, too. I’m working on saving all of my really good material from talk.origins from rotting away in old Usenet archives by reposting it here. It’s a hard slog trying to extract the really good stuff though! Anyway, the post:
This is kind of off-topic, but it’s a “warm, fuzzy” story, so you might wanna read it.
I’ve been on talk.origins … gee, I don’t know how long now, maybe something like 2 years. I’ve been interested in evolution/religion a lot longer than that and was thrilled when I found a good place to discuss it online.
So, I’m 18 now, and I go to college in a week (University of Maryland, College Park if you’re interested). I am rather happy to be going to college, because I get to outfit my dorm room with killer equipment that other people cannot afford - I got a full scholarship, you see!
Let me tell you, getting a full scholarship here is very tough. They have about 100 full scholarships for all 4 grades, and there are about 26,000 undergraduates. It’s not that I’m not very smart, I just wasn’t very dedicated in my schoolwork (thanks in no part to the distraction of talk.origins AHEM). I had a final GPA of something like 3.85, and a weighted GPA of 4.75 (I took nothing but Honors classes my last 3 years). But in the end, it was talk.origins that saved me (never mind how it negatively impacted my high school grades).
Besides looking at your essays, high school grades, etc., the interview is a very important part of the scholarship decision process. The interviews were conducted by groups of three professors, … and lo and behold, who should I get on my interviewing staff but a professor of biology!
So I had a long discussion about evolution with him. We were talking about abiogenesis, punctuated equilibrium, stuff like that. He was really impressed. Meanwhile the other 2 interviewers were spellbound that I was talking to this biology professor in all of these advanced topics (this isn’t the kind of stuff high schoolers would know, even if they took AP Biology).
So, they were very impressed. The biology professor commended me on how much free time I spent on various educational pursuits, and said that he personally would be checking out talk.origins. I left the interview feeling very pleased. And, sure enough, about a month later, I got a letter in the mail saying I had been awarded a full scholarship!
So, I would like to formally thank all of the wonderful people on talk.origins for the many tens of thousands of dollars I’ll be saving over the course of the next four years. I (really) couldn’t have done it without you. I’d like to thank all the regulars (Wilkins, Bryant, Sienkiewicz, et al, you know who you are). And I’d even like to thank our resident trolls (who I will not mention) for provoking endless discussions that helped fill my brain up with all sorts of cool information that ended up being useful on a scholarship admission interview.
I have to start packing now, I’ll see you all again when I’m relocated to my college dorm.
–
Usenet is a strange reality where you see people beating up a patch of
grass where nine years ago there used to be a horse. -Nuke
It’s really quite something that if that fifteen minute interview hadn’t gone so well, I’d be sitting on about $60,000 in student debt right now (rather than no debt).
June 17th, 2008 at 21:41
[...] A good interview [...]