As a practice for our interviewing of people more knowledgeable then us about our eminent person, we interviewed our classmates and asked them questions about themselves. From this process I learned several things about how to perform a better interview when I (eventually) get to interview my eminent person. Firstly I found being interviewed quite difficult, and I think this will help me to be a better interviewer as I now better understand some of the difficulties of being interviewed. I also think that in this interviewing process I learned more from watching the group I was partnered with do interviewed then I did from doing my own. Firstly I noted something smart that the other group had done was have larger questions with small relating sub questions, so that the interviewee wasn’t bombarded with an assortment of different questions that they had to change there train of thought to answer. I think what I learned from this mock interviewing process that I can quite possibly apply to my official interview are, I should have had better prepared questions, I didn’t make having thoughtful questions priority and instead went for quantity over quality, as well I certainly should have had more sub questions as well as larger question instead of just having larger questions that didn’t flow well. As an interviewer I didn’t prioritize body langue, such as being open and making eye contact and was critiqued on this, specifically for not making enough eye contact, this was probably from a mix of not having my questions memorized (which while it doesn’t seem mandatory for an interview, is something I will certainly strive to do in the future.) and being slightly nervous about interviewing someone, it was a different experience the what I am usually used to. If anything my slight lack of preparedness and nerves highlighted the reasons why doing a mock interview was incredibly important. From this test I learned a lot, when I am actually interviewing someone for my eminent person I want my interviewing skills to be very polished, especially with even the one in a million chance that I could interview my eminent person. regardless of who I interview I do not wish to waste there time with me not knowing my own questions well enough. I will use all of the skills that I learned in the mock interview in my actually interview.
I think I learned a surprising amount from this exercise. I have recently had to practice interviewing for other classes and I thought that I had my interviewing skill down, however doing this kind of an interview was definitely different from my other experiences and I’m glad that I got this chance to learn from myself and my peers about the interviewing process.