What to Wear and Set Up for a University Video Interview

Will being ugly affect my supplemental?

No. Plainly, and not as a kindness: no. Reviewers score your video against a rubric the program wrote, and every published description of those rubrics is about content. Ivey scores leadership. Schulich lists leadership potential, integrity, resourcefulness, resilience and collaboration. McMaster Engineering says it reviews academics and the supp app together, holistically. Kira’s own camera tips page ends by saying that the content of your responses is what matters most to the admissions team. A reviewer on their thirtieth video of the afternoon is listening for whether your story had a situation, a decision and a result. Your face is not on the sheet.

What does get scored, indirectly, is whether the reviewer can hear and understand you. Bad audio, a face in shadow, a camera pointed up your nose: those cost you, not because they are ugly but because they make the content harder to receive. Everything below is about that, and none of it costs money.

Clothing

Dress the way you would for a meeting with a teacher you respect: a plain collared shirt, a sweater, a blouse, a clean top with no writing on it. Not a suit, unless you would be comfortable in one, because discomfort shows in your shoulders and a jacket looks strange at a desk in your bedroom. Solid colours over patterns; thin stripes and small checks shimmer on webcams. Avoid the exact colour of your wall. Anything you would wear to a part-time job interview is right. Nobody has ever lost a place for wearing a hoodie, but a plain shirt removes one thing a tired reviewer could notice instead of your answer, so wear the shirt.

Camera height and framing

The camera lens should be at your eye level or just above. A laptop on a desk puts it at chin height, which gives the reviewer your ceiling and the underside of your jaw. Put the laptop on a stack of books until the lens is level with your eyes. Kira’s tip is to centre yourself with your face and shoulders visible, and to position the screen where you can read it just below eye level. Sit about an arm’s length back. Your head should fill the middle third of the frame, with a little space above it.

Lighting

Light in front of you, never behind. Kira’s advice is natural light, source in front, so the admissions team can see your face. In practice: face a window during the day, or put a desk lamp behind the laptop pointed at your face, bounced off a wall or a sheet of paper if it is harsh. A window behind you turns you into a silhouette and the camera cannot fix it. Overhead lights alone put shadows in your eye sockets. Test by taking a photo with the webcam: if you can see both your eyes clearly, it is fine.

Background

A plain wall is best, and Kira says so. A bookshelf is fine. An unmade bed, a door people walk through, a window with traffic, a poster with words on it: all of these pull the eye. Virtual backgrounds are a bad idea on Kira because they flicker around your hair and make it look like you are hiding something. If your room is the only room, angle the desk so the camera sees the plainest wall, and take the laundry out of frame. Two minutes.

Audio

Audio matters more than video. A reviewer will forgive a dim face and will not forgive straining to hear. Use the laptop’s built-in microphone in a quiet room, or wired earbuds with a mic; Kira supports a headset or headphones with a built-in microphone. Big over-ear headphones look odd and are unnecessary. Close the door, turn off the fan, tell the household the time. A room with a rug and curtains echoes less than a bare one. Record a practice question and listen back on the same earbuds; if you hear a hum, find and unplug it.

Notes

One sticky note, on the wall beside the camera at eye level, with at most six words on it: the names of your stories. Not sentences. If your notes are on the desk, every glance is a head drop the reviewer sees; if they are beside the lens, a glance is a flick. If the note has sentences on it you will read them, and reading is the one delivery problem that reliably costs marks, because Waterloo, among others, says in its interview advice not to read from a piece of paper. The Kira Talent interview practice guide covers what the programs say about notes in more detail.

Eye line

Look at the lens when you are talking, not at your own face on the screen. Kira’s tip is exactly this: looking into the camera creates the effect of eye contact. A small piece of tape next to the lens helps. Looking away to think for a second or two is normal and reads as thinking. The habit to break is watching yourself, because it makes you look at the reviewer’s chest for two minutes. Some students shrink the browser window so their preview is tiny and nearer the lens; that works.

Phone or laptop

Laptop. Kira’s device page supports phones and tablets but recommends a laptop or desktop, and so does everyone who has done it on a phone. A phone gets calls, drops to lock screen, runs out of battery and sits at the wrong height. If the phone is genuinely your only option, prop it landscape at eye level on a shelf, put it on do-not-disturb, plug it in, and use Chrome on Android or Safari on iOS 17 or later. On the laptop use Chrome, plug it in, and turn off every browser extension, including Grammarly and ad blockers, which Kira names as things that break the recording.

The ten-minute pre-flight checklist

1. Laptop plugged in. Battery-saving mode off. Phone on silent and out of reach.
2. Chrome, one tab, all extensions disabled. Every other app closed, especially anything that uses the camera or mic.
3. Wired internet if you have it; if not, sit near the router and ask the house to stay off Netflix for half an hour.
4. Lens at eye level on a stack of books. Face and shoulders in frame, space above your head.
5. Light in front. Take a webcam photo: both eyes visible, no window behind you.
6. Background checked in that photo. Nothing with words, nothing that moves.
7. Door closed, fan off, household told the time. Water within reach, out of frame.
8. One sticky note by the lens, six words maximum. Nothing on the desk.
9. Kira practice question run once for audio and framing, then listened back. Check the Assessment Details slide for the number of questions and the timers.
10. Bathroom, deep breath, shirt straight, and you press start. Do not check the mirror again.

Where to go from here

Now that the room is sorted, the words: the Kira Talent practice guide explains how the practice questions differ from the real ones, why retakes are the program’s call, and which Ontario programs use which timers. For the questions themselves, the video interview questions guide has the full bank by competency with sample answers. If the very first prompt is the one everybody flubs, the tell me about yourself guide shows how to make the 60-second version land. Then do the dress rehearsal on the real setup: AcceptMe’s custom interviews put you on camera with an unseen question, a prep window and a hard answer clock, and hand you the transcript with the coach’s notes so the run-through on your own laptop counts for something.