i love being on in the middle of the night. i get to be the first poster a ton!
as for your questions:
- usually, schools try to make them on mondays or fridays, because they know you'll have to miss school or work. some schools interview every day, some schools only two days a week or something like that. but if a school has limited interview days, usually one of the days is near a weekend.
- depends on the school. some schools will send you a list of 10 days and ask you to pick one. some will ask you to send them a few days of availablity and give you one of those days. some schools will just give you a day to interview without asking if you're available. if you have a conflict with an interview day, you can always call to reschedule (your rescheduled day might be as much as a couple of months after your originally scheduled day, so if you're like most people who want to interview as early in the interview season as they can, you might just try to work around your conflict).
- again, depends on the school. most schools try to be accomodating about this sort of thing, but some just won't budge. if you know you're going to be interviewed by two nearby schools, you can pretty easily arrange to have them on consecutive days, or something similar, so you only have to make one trip. and if you know you've got an interview from one school and you're still waiting to hear from a nearby school, you could write an email to the admissions office letting them know that you'll be in the area on this certain day, and ask them if they know if they'll be offering you an interview so you could schedule to come at the same time. make sure you say that if they're not ready to consider your application yet, that's fine too. i did that with northwestern, and they sent me an interview invitation two days later. but some schools won't do that. it all depends on how nice you are and how nice the admissions people are.
hope this helped
