[kevinburke]

OP here - please trust that I have given this a lot of thought, both through hours and hours of examining the conversation and introspecting my answers, and (months) later, in a long phone call with the director of the program, who very generously walked me through why they made the decision they did.

I alluded to this in the post - this wasn’t the only thing I did wrong, not at all, but it was by far the easiest to change and the clearest signal to the interviewers that I was overconfident and incurious, and the other stuff would just detract from the message that’s already there.

[clwk]

Thanks for the response. It's valuable that they gave you detailed feedback. The post would be strengthened by enough specifics grounded in that actual feedback to have preempted my response. In any case, I appreciate the conversation.

My comment here should not be read as a personal judgment. It's more of a literary critique of your article as instance of a genre—with an extra helping of editorial critique of that genre.