I remember how dreadful my first interview was when applying to colleges. I froze. I didn’t know what to respond or to ask, and I couldn’t focus.
Since then, I’ve always seen interviews in a bad way. When preparing a resume and all other written parts of an application, I always had time to think, rethink, write, rewrite, and make every single change I wanted to make, no matter how small. And I’ve always thought of interviews as the exact opposite of that: as a fast process, in which spontaneity and speed are as important as everything else. A process in which “selling yourself” means more than in any other part of an application. And since I dislike this concept, I saw that as one more reason to put in my box of reasons to hate interviews.

However, understanding that I’ll have to be interviewed in the future, I decided to attend GRF Seema’s Interview Prep Seminar.

During the seminar, Seema showed us how, for most parts of an interview, there could be (and should be) a careful preparation. Even for aspects which I otherwise considered more “generic”, such as questions about goals, there is plenty of room for preparation: researching about particular (even if small or specific) ideas/goals/news of the company and linking your experiences and hopes to them or using them as basis for your argument can go a long way. Although I saw these small news/facts as interesting in creating a sense of belonging, I never saw them as important enough to be mentioned in interviews. But they help interviewers to understand you better, which is very positive.

Probably the most important thing about the interview for me, however, was to see the process a bit more through the other side. Since I get very anxious in interviews, it’s easy for me to not see the interviewer’s viewpoint in an accurate way (for example, I tend to simply imagine them judging me and noticing every small mistake of mine). In this sense, seeing a bit more from their perspective and what they are looking for when asking different kinds of questions (for instance, how they can ask some unexpected questions just to see how you respond, or how questions about previous experiences and motivations serve for them to not only link your information to a person but also to remember the information altogether) was really useful to help me see interviews in a more subjective and humane way.

Overall, the seminar helped disproving some of my initial misconceptions of interviews (by, for example, showing how there can be a really careful preparation for more details than I otherwise imagined) and helped me to see them in a more positive light, so I’m really glad to have attended it, and I think it’ll be helpful for me, in the future! (I’m not saying it made me like interviews or something like that. I don’t. But I dislike them a bit less than before because I understand them a bit better now =) )