What Is InitialView and Do You Need One?

(And What About Glimpse?)

By Lindsey Kundel, Editor in Chief

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a family consultation when I bring up video interviews. Parents lean in. Students lean back. Everyone senses, correctly, that we’ve arrived at one more thing — one more platform, one more account to create, one more thing to get right in an application that already has too many places to get things wrong.

So let me say the honest thing first: you do not automatically need this. Neither of these products is required by most schools, and “more signaling” is not the same as “better signaling.” But for the right student, with the time to do it well, InitialView and its newer sibling Glimpse can do something a transcript and a personal statement genuinely cannot — let an admissions officer hear an actual voice, unrehearsed, and believe it. That’s worth understanding clearly enough to decide for yourself, rather than doing it because someone told you to.

InitialView: the live interview

This is the original product, and it is exactly what it sounds like — a live, unscripted, one-on-one conversation with a trained interviewer, often a former admissions officer, immediately followed by a twenty-minute timed writing sample. Total time, about thirty-five minutes. Nothing is scripted. Nothing is edited. The interviewer is trained to hear a canned answer coming and steer the conversation somewhere it can’t reach. You watch the finished interview before you decide whether to send it, and once you do, it goes to as many colleges as you choose — one conversation, unlimited destinations.

I think this format earns its cost and its time for a specific kind of applicant: an international student who needs to demonstrate spoken English fluency in a moment nobody had the chance to prepare, a homeschooled or virtual-school student whose transcript doesn’t map cleanly onto a traditional record, or a student whose intellectual depth simply reads better out loud than it does on paper — which happens more often than people expect. Current pricing runs around $200 or more, though fee waivers are widely available through school counselors and access programs, so cost alone shouldn’t be the reason a student rules it out before checking. Pricing shifts by cycle; treat that figure as a starting point and confirm current numbers at initialview.com.

Glimpse: the sixty-to-ninety-second snapshot

Glimpse is doing something almost entirely different, and I wish more families understood that before booking either one. It’s a self-recorded, selfie-style video, sixty to ninety seconds, no live interviewer, no timed writing sample. You record it yourself on the platform, delete and re-record as many times as you like, and lock in a final take — no editing or filters allowed once you’ve chosen it. Because the same video goes to every school on your list, you also can’t name-drop a specific college inside it.

Where InitialView is trying to verify something, Glimpse is trying to reveal something — a hobby, a specific texture of personality, the version of a student a personal statement simply didn’t have room for. It’s open to domestic and international applicants alike, and at $22 flat to send to unlimited schools, free with a fee waiver, it asks for a fraction of the investment InitialView does, in both time and money. If a student has ninety spare seconds and one true thing about themselves that the rest of the application hasn’t captured, I have a hard time finding a reason not to do this one.

Quick comparison

How to actually prepare for either one

For InitialView, the worst thing a student can do is walk in with a memorized script — interviewers are trained to hear one coming, and a rehearsed answer reads, ironically, as less impressive than an honest one that wanders a little. I tell students to think less about predicting questions and more about knowing their own material well: what could you talk about for ten minutes without getting bored? What’s a piece of feedback that actually changed how you think, not the one that sounds best in an essay?

For Glimpse, the instinct to resist is narrating instead of showing. If you bake, film it mid-recipe instead of describing baking to a camera. If you draw, put the sketchbook in frame and let it speak. The strongest Glimpse videos I’ve seen tend to follow one of a few shapes: a walk through a real, lived-in space — a garage, a studio, a kitchen — a single object held up and given its story, or a student speaking plainly to camera about one specific, slightly odd interest they actually care about. Ninety seconds isn’t long enough to cover everything you are. It’s long enough to prove one true thing, and one true thing, well shown, does more work than five things summarized.

Where this fits into working with a coach

We don’t sell InitialView or Glimpse prep as a standalone product, and I’d be skeptical of anyone who does — over-rehearsing for a format specifically designed to expose over-rehearsal is its own kind of failure, a solution that defeats the problem it’s solving. What we do offer, as part of the broader graduate coaching relationship, includes mock interview support, so a student walks into an InitialView conversation knowing their own story well enough to speak it naturally rather than perform it, and honest guidance on whether either format actually belongs in their particular strategy.

Because that’s the real question underneath all of this, and it’s the one I’d want a family to ask before they ask which platform to choose: not which one is more impressive, but what gap in this particular application either of these would actually close. For a lot of students, the honest answer is neither, and that’s a perfectly good answer. For the right student, with the time to do it well, either one can hand an admissions officer something no transcript ever could — a voice, unscripted, worth believing.

If you’re not sure whether InitialView, Glimpse, or something else entirely belongs in your application strategy, that’s exactly the kind of question a graduate coach can help you answer. Book a free strategy call with one of our Former Admissions Officers, and we’ll help you figure out where your time is best spent.