Emailing with department chair and a professor in my subfield

Scheduling interviews with faculty

Admitted to the Geotechnical Engineering (GEO) area in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

They were sending out interview invites this week but I wasn't shortlisted. Got a mail rejection this morning. Ah well, the grapes are sour anyway. Time to go panic about the other programs I've applied to.

Not overly surprised, but it wasn't one of my top choices so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Email: "Unfortunately I write to tell you that we are moving on to the interview stage, but your application is not one that our full faculty review identified for an interview. We know that this is not the news you wanted to here [sic], and that you put a great deal of time into your application. There was a very competitive pool this year and many interesting applications are not moving forward to interviews. We encourage you to reach out, ideally around September, for feedback towards a future application."

I got contacted by a professor whose research interests do not quite match with mine. Are the interviews for general admission? Was it the case for the posters below?

To the poster who asked about the track, my track is Architecture, Computer Systems, and Embedded Systems (ACSES).

To the UT Austin ECE posts below, what's your track?

to the poster below, congrats on the interview! Was this an informal interview and if not, do you know if they are only interviewing linguistics candidates? Haven't heard anything from fellow BioAnth applicants, just wondering if this is specific to your subfield

2 years of research experience.

Was notified via Email that I am invited to interview day February 21st on campus.