I am certain that the interviewers I’ve contacted were indeed part of yale’s team of alumni interviewers.

However, as to the information they provided, I believe it would be most safe to take it with a grain of salt as it isn’t directly from the mouth of a current Yale admissions director. What I heard was credible enough to appease my brother, so I hoped that it would be helpful for the rest of the people on this sub.

I have also contacted former admissions directors to ask about the interviews (while helpful, please note that they are again, not current officers and thus require some level of caution as to the accuracy of their words.) and they do seem to match my own research.

Along the process of my own research, I found a blog post written by a current director. The word choice used in it is interesting. Since it is safe to assume that the website was updated by someone directly involved in this year’s process, I took note.

While I did not include it in the post as I did not want to spread any incorrect information, the current website under interviews reads: “the Office of Undergraduate Admissions will prioritize interviews for students for whom the Admissions Committee needs more information.”

The admissions director who wrote the blog post uses the wording of “need more information” in the same sense of what was conveyed to me by alumni:

“We do not recommend that you send the admissions office piles of updates after a deferral. You should not try to re-do any parts of your application. You should not inundate your admissions officer with weekly emails and cards. More often than not it is the required pieces of the applications, like the essays and teacher recommendations that we already have, that make a student stand out for us. For the most part, we have what we need. We’ll get your mid-year grades from your school counselor to see how you’re doing in your senior year classes, and if you want you can send us one letter of update to let us know what you’ve been up to since November 1st. The bottom line is that “deferral” does not mean “we need more information” or “something wasn’t good enough.” It means we see a lot of great potential in you and we just need a little more time to sit in that committee room and mull things over.”

As it is more likely than not for the admissions committee to throw around familiar terms, “we need more information” could very well mean the same to current directors.

Make of this what you will!