Practice Interviews

To prepare for our interview for the Eminent person project, we split into groups and interviewed each other for practice, and rated our interviews. I think that I learned a lot from these practice interviews. For example, one thing I learned was that I have a good habit of addressing the interviewee before interviewing them. I asked them about how they were doing, etc. Another thing I learned was that elaborating on questions was helpful. When I or the person interviewing me was asking questions, they sometimes got confusing either because of length or complexity of words. To counter this, we gave examples or explained what we meant more thoroughly. This turned out to be very effective in showing the main idea. However, I learned that I have some things to work on as well. My posture was sometimes not proper, as I had my arms crossed sometimes. This made me look uninterested in the person, so I need to fix that by keeping it in mind. As well as this, I learned that I need to improve on my enthusiasm. I sounded almost bored sometimes, or robotic. This probably made my interviewee feel pressured to answer, or feel uncomfortable and not bother give good answers. I can work on this by altering my voice or expressions to show my feelings well, such as showing excitement, surprise, and awe, or even negative emotions such as concern if the interviewee tells a sad story or fact. And possibly to get a wide range of emotions, I can add more interesting questions, which was one of my strengths. I can ask questions that really make someone think, and mixed with breaks in the form of simple or closed questions. I feel I was good at doing a mix of these, but I also learned it was difficult to come up with a mix of questions that I could remember or insert into the conversation. I learned that I had to make questions that related to each other, or at least make the really important questions interconnected somehow. This way I could add them into the conversation in a professional way, and avoid making it sound awkward. That was the overall goal of these practice interviews as well. I learned a lot about how to make my interview professional, and hopefully this will help me with my actual interview.