Placement interviews have become a significant discourse genre at universities as they determine access to social, monetary, or cultural resources. Despite their significance, almost no linguistic studies handle this specific discourse genre in academic communication. Employing a conversation-analytic approach, this inquiry explores a corpus of placement interviews in which representatives of a German university interview Chinese students applying for a study year at the German university. It is explored how Chinese applicants present their second-hand knowledge about Germany and German universities in a conversation with university representatives who have first-hand knowledge about these spaces, i. e., it is explored how interviewers and interviewees handle epistemic asymmetry when they construct and talk about academic spaces in China and Germany. While some aspects of German academia are situated in imagined spaces of which Chinese students cannot have direct knowledge, students are expected to know about other aspects of German academia that are situated in knowable spaces. Moreover, applicants and interviewers take varying evaluative and affective stances toward the different academic spaces and thus construct cultural difference. Interviewers treat German academia as a different or a foreign space. As part of a “hidden academic agenda” of university placement interviews, students construct German academia as a desired space with many opportunities and they present Chinese academia as an unsatisfying space they would like to leave behind. The article adds to recent studies of interactional sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, and epistemics in interaction by extending their reach to the practices of affective and epistemic stance taking in intercultural communication.