How to Ace the Telluride Association Summer Seminar (TASS) Interview
Most high school interviews are more or less a vibe check—interviewers want to put a face to an application and assess a student’s enthusiasm, friendliness, and soft skills. For the Telluride Association Summer Seminar (TASS), it’s an intellectual stress test.
If you just received an interview invitation, congratulations—you are in the top 5% of an already elite applicant pool. That alone is an honor, and yes, you should include it in your college application.
But now the real work begins. Unlike college interviews that ask about your favorite subject or your “biggest weakness,” TASS interviewers want to see how you think, how you handle disagreement, and how you navigate the complexities of power, identity, and justice. TASS seminars, after all, are largely discussion-based—they want to see what kind of student you will be in classrooms where your worldview, opinions, and beliefs are challenged.
Here is our guide for acing the TASS interview.
Questions from Previous Years
These are questions that either our students were asked or students we’ve spoken to have reported they were asked during their TASS interviews:
How would you define racism, and why do you think racism is still prevalent today?
Describe a time you engaged in a difficult conversation about identity or power.
Do you think the current distribution of income is fair? If not, how could it be changed?
What is a piece of art/literature/history that changed your perspective on justice?
Describe a time you had to deal with a challenging or exclusionary situation in a group.
What specific, unique perspective or contribution would you bring to TASS?
Aside from these, all interviewees have reported being asked questions about their application essays, and then follow-up questions based on their responses.
Interrogate the Premise
TASS interviewers love a trap question. They might ask follow-up questions to your responses, such as:
“Isn’t identity politics inherently divisive?”
“Does free speech include hate speech?”
“Is objectivity even possible?”
These are supposed to push you. They are not trying to guide you toward what they think is the “right” answer. The strongest candidates don’t rush to defend a position. They slow down and analyze the question itself.
Instead of reacting immediately, try:
“That depends on how we’re defining identity politics…”
“I think the premise assumes that division is inherently negative—can we unpack that?”
“I’m not sure it’s binary. There may be tension between X and Y.”
They want to see intellectual humility and precision. It’s okay to complicate the question. In fact, that’s often the point.
Weaponize Your Reading List
TASS would hate the above subtitle—if you’ve read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, you know why.
That’s exactly why you shouldn’t go into a TASS interview empty-handed. TASS is looking for well-read humanities students who have built their critical thinking skills by reading important thinkers who have laid the groundwork for these kinds of discussions. There’s no definitive list of books you will have needed to read before applying, but we recommend having 2–3 foundational texts ready to reference. You don’t need to have memorized every page, but you should understand their core arguments.
You don’t need to have read everything, but you should have wrestled deeply with something. We’ve made a working reading list below, but these are just suggestions. In many cases, you don’t need to read the whole book—a chapter or two that defines key theoretical concepts is enough.
If your understanding of terms like “carceral state” or “intersectionality” comes primarily from social media summaries, pause. Go to the source text. Even excerpts.
Show Your Thinking, Not Just Your Conclusion
TASS isn’t evaluating your ideology—they already have a strong understanding of that from the several essays you wrote that won you this interview invite. They’re evaluating your reasoning, particularly what you’re like when you need to think on your feet.
TASS interviewers are not timing you. If anything, speed is suspicious. Students who learned their politics from short-form content often deliver polished monologues, speak in slogans, rush to fill silence, and panic when asked to define terms.
If you make a claim, walk them through how you got there. Reference:
A book that shaped your thinking
A historical example
A contradiction you’re still wrestling with
A time you changed your mind
You do not need to sound like a PhD candidate defending their dissertation. They just want to see that you have genuinely engaged with the ideas you’re discussing in the interview. A thoughtful answer that includes uncertainty is far more impressive than a rehearsed, overconfident one.
Try some of these pivot phrases:
“Let me think about that for a second.”
“I’m trying to distinguish between moral disagreement and epistemic disagreement…”
“I might revise this as I talk.”
That last one is golden for responses where you are constructing an idea that you haven’t been asked about before—it’s so honest and vulnerable, but simultaneously emotionally intelligent.
Quick Prep Exercise:
Practice talking through this prompt: “Is economic inequality inevitable? Explain why or why not.”
Take 2 minutes to explain your reasoning out loud, referencing a book, historical example, or personal observation.
Demonstrate Comfort With Disagreement
TASS classrooms are intense. Students debate. They push each other and revise their thinking through these conversations. You need to be the kind of person who has already admitted they might be wrong before attending TASS. If you already know everything, how can they teach you anything?
Interviewers may push back on your ideas not because they disagree personally, but because they want to see how you respond. If challenged, do not become defensive. However, don’t back down immediately just to be agreeable.
Instead, try:
“That’s interesting—I hadn’t thought about it that way.”
“I see the tension there. I’d probably respond by…”
“I’m not fully convinced, but I can see why someone might argue…”
Since they will select parts of your application essay to base a few questions on, reread these beforehand. Ask yourself: What ideas do I put forward that someone might disagree with? How can I defend these ideas from a place of understanding rather than becoming defensive?
Pro Tip: Ask a friend or adult you trust to read your essay and come up with three to five questions that push back on your points. Try to defend your ideas using a specific theoretical framework or points made by a writer whose ideas you admire.
Avoid Performative Activism
TASS applicants often care deeply about justice and social issues. That’s wonderful. But the interview is not the time for buzzwords without depth. TASS is wary about admitting students whose social justice understanding comes solely from social media echo chambers.
If you plan to use terms like “systemic oppression,” “imperialism,” “intersectionality,” “decolonization,” or “capitalist structures,” you’d better have a strong foundational understanding of their definitions. Be prepared to define them clearly and apply them to a concrete example. The fastest way to falter in a TASS interview is to rely on language you can’t unpack.
Let’s say you use the word “systemic,” for example. Systemic in what sense? Legal? Cultural? Economic? Through what mechanisms? For instance, systemic housing discrimination can include both historical redlining policies and contemporary zoning laws that reinforce economic segregation. If the current system is failing, what principle or model are you comparing it to?
This is where students who’ve only absorbed discourse mainly from bite-sized media will falter because they’ve inherited conclusions without understanding the architecture beneath them. You want to go back to the source text to learn where these ideas originate from and how scholars in the field use them.
Be a Future Seminar Participant, Not a Political Candidate
You are not campaigning. You are not delivering a speech. You are having a conversation.
The best interviews feel like intellectual play—two equals exploring ideas curiously and thoughtfully. Remember: TASS seminars are small, discussion-based communities. Interviewers are asking themselves, “Would I want to spend six weeks in conversation with this person?”
Make sure the answer is yes.
Bottom Line
The TASS interview is not about proving you are the most radical or the most progressive person in the room. It’s about proving you are teachable, rigorous, and brave enough to think in real time.
If your evidence-grounded solution is rejected by a peer during the seminar, TASS wants to know how you’ll react. Leadership in this context isn’t about winning the debate. They want to know you are capable of collaborative inquiry.
The TASS interview is, for many students, the first time they will be asked to defend their moral and intellectual convictions in a high-pressure environment. It can be jarring. But it’s a rare opportunity to prove you belong in the room with the world’s future thinkers. Don’t go in unprepared.
TASS READING LIST
Below are a few foundational texts for students. Whether you’re applying to TASS, trying to prep for an interview, or just looking to grapple with some complex ideas about the world, these are great options to expand your critical thinking.
If nothing else, they make fantastic SAT/ACT reading and writing prep!
How knowledge shapes empire: Orientalism – Edward W. Said
On education and power: Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Paulo Freire
Colonial psychology and identity: Black Skin, White Masks – Frantz Fanon
Empirical inequality trends: Capital in the Twenty-First Century – Thomas Piketty
Surveillance and institutional control: Discipline and Punish – Michel Foucault
Prison abolition: Are Prisons Obsolete – Angela Davis
Image culture and commodified reality: The Society of the Spectacle – Guy Debord
Fairness and institutions: A Theory of Justice – John Rawls
Gender as a constructed category: The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir or Gender Trouble – Judith Butler
How crises are used to restructure political economies: The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein
Propaganda and public discourse: The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt, or Manufacturing Consent – Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Structural incarceration: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – Michelle Alexander
Lived experience and race: Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
Structural housing inequality grounded in lived experience: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City – Matthew Desmond
Moral narratives surrounding debt and obligation: Debt: The First 5,000 Years – David Graeber
Accessible but substantive gender analysis: We Should All Be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Double consciousness and identity formation: The Souls of Black Folk – W. E. B. Du Bois
Media formats shaping public discourse: Amusing Ourselves to Death – Neil Postman
