For the practice interview, I had to think of 3 closed and 7 open questions to ask my assigned partner. It wasn’t very difficult to think of open-ended questions, since my class worked on asking open-ended questions last year. The difficult part was thinking of closed-ended questions. Not all of them had to be relevent to the interview but it was still hard to think of easier questions to start with.
Coming up with closed and open questions will help me think of questions to ask my eminent person.
Braedon was my partner for the practice interviews and we took turns asking each other questions. During my interview, Emilie from the other partner group assessed me. I feel like the interview wasn’t as hard as I thought, but it’s probably because Braedon and I are both in TALONS so it felt more comfortable. During the eminent interview, I will have to keep in mind that it won’t feel as comfortable as the practice interview, so I can prepare ahead of time.
After my practice interview, I got some feedback from Emilie. For my strengths, she said that I was speaking clearly and with confidence. As I mentioned above, I will be meeting and interviewing someone new during my eminent interview, so I wouldn’t feel as comfortable as I did during the practice. I will need to find a way to calm my nerves during the interview to also speak clearly and confidently, just like the practice interview.
The reason I will need to keep this in mind is that the other person can hear what I am saying clearly, and see that I am prepared for the interview by being confident with my words. If I don’t sound confident, the person won’t think I’m prepared and probably won’t think that I’m taking things seriously. This wouldn’t be good during the eminent interview because then the person I’m interviewing will also lose interest, resulting in lost information.
Emilie also gave me some stretches I should keep in mind for my eminent interview. Even though I was speaking confidently, she noticed that my body language was a little bit awkward. I feel like I can change this by keeping my posture and making sure my body language is open, and not closed and reserved. This was the only stretch Emilie mentioned to me. She said that she wasn’t able to find any more.
This can help me during the actual interview because as I said above, body language and posture can show how interested and engaged you are in the interview. I will keep this in mind during the actual interview, so I can take in as much information as I can from my eminent person.
Overall, this was a nice way to practice for the actual interview and I will take everything I learned from it to my interview!