[Eminent] Peer Interview Reflection

Hello! In this blog post, I will be reflecting on the process of interviewing a peer to practice for my eminent person interview.

I found learning how to interview someone to be a challenge. I will not dwell too much on the process of being interviewed, but I found being interviewed even more difficult, as I had to come up with good, professional answers to questions that were not too short and not too long, all while maintaining eye contact. However, this experience helped better prepare me to interview somebody else because I could be more patient with the person that I was interviewing. I found that giving an example answer after asking a question and nodding my head in encouragement as somebody answered are two ways that I could make it easier for the person I was interviewing. A large part of what I learned from the interview process came from the feedback I received from the person observing my interview. I learned that a number of questions that I asked were long-winded and confusing, which makes sense considering that I am not a very concise person overall. I will try my best to stick to my written questions better in the future, break questions down into smaller chunks and try more straightforward questions to slowly get to the answer. I would not want to overwhelm the person I was interviewing. I also learned that I tend to fidget with my hands a lot, which is practically unavoidable for me, but in future interviews, I will try to keep that to a minimum or find ways to keep it mostly hidden as I understand it could be distracting for my interviewee. I am grateful for the positive feedback I received as well because it confirmed that my strength when it comes to interviewing is how friendly and enthusiastic I am. There may be a lot of areas where I still need to improve, but the positive feedback helped me understand which areas I do not need to focus on when I practice going forward.

This interview assignment was a very valuable learning experience where I got to know my strengths and my stretches when it comes to interviewing people. I want to improve in the areas where I received constructive feedback and I will try my best to practice and apply what I learned to future interviews, especially for Eminent.