Practice interview reflection

When practicing interviewing my peers, I learned a lot that I could use when conducting my real interview. One of the more basic but important things that I learned was to practice for the interview before doing it. By this, I mean practicing the interview with the same questions, not different ones. When doing this you get a feel for how your questions sound, and you can adjust them accordingly. Practicing the interview before also is just helpful for when doing the real interview. By practicing I can be more familiar with the questions and therefore I would also be more confident with them, resulting in fewer um’s and a louder, clearer voice.   

Another thing that I took from the practice interviews was pre-writing possible expansions for the main questions. Whenever I wanted to follow up on a question, I found it difficult to think of another question on the spot that could relate. I ended up wasting time, and in the future, I think that it would be better if I thought of some follow-up questions before the interview.   

Finally, one last thing that I can take away from the practice interviews was note-taking. I observed that taking notes and typing what the interviewee said ended up dragging out the interview and was not very efficient. For interviews like these that have a time limit, you want to use as much as possible. I found that simply recording the session and taking notes after was a lot better and faster. It was awkward when I had to finish typing after the subject finished answering a question.   

In conclusion, I have taken helpful ideas such as practicing before, pre-writing expansions for questions, and efficient note-taking. By practicing before, I can be more familiar with the questions and more confident, thus ending in fewer um’s and a better speaking voice.  By pre-writing possible expansions for questions, I would be more prepared and I would save some time by already having the questions. Lastly, I found that recording the session and taking notes after was more time-efficient than taking notes during the interview. In short, these practice interviews gave me a lot to think about when conducting my real interview, and I will cherish this information.