I finally had my mock interview at Arts and Sciences Career Services yesterday. For those of you who don't know, I've been turned down now by about half a dozen different jobs to which I've applied. In some instances, my application has been rejected out of hand, and I have not even been granted an interview. In other cases, I made it to the final round of interviewing, and did something (or failed to do something) that made my interlocutor decide that I was not the best choice for the job. In one particularly frustrating case, I actually performed quite well at an interview, but because of a misunderstanding regarding the program, disqualified myself from participation. No potential employer gave me any feedback regarding my mistakes (why should they have?), and I desperately needed to know why everyone has thus far refused to hire me.
My appointment was only schedule to last 15 minutes, but it lasted an hour and a half. The career counselor analyzed the form and content of my interview, discussed my resume with me, and suggested possible job opportunities. It also turned out that she was a fellow Ithaca High School alum, and, therefore, a Mrs. PB fan (we both majored in History at Cornell because of Mrs. PB).
I learned a lot from my interview feedback. I'm not going to list in detail every single mistake that I made, but I'll explain a few. First of all, I do not give enough information when asked "tell me about yourself." I haven't lived a particularly interesting life (as many of you may know), no matter how enjoyable it has been thus far, so I tend to make a few cursory remarks about growing up in upstate New York, attending Cornell, and studying abroad at the University of Paris. What I should have been doing was leading this question back to the employment at hand -- i.e. what the interviewer is
really asking is "who are you that you should have this job." It's almost not too much to say that an employer will want to hear a teleological life story with the job in question as the natural next step. Second of all, I list too many things, and too many of the wrong things, when asked "what are your weaknesses." I have been taking the opposite approach of the people who give answers such as "I work too hard," and "I'm a perfectionist," even though at least one of these is true in my case. I have been giving responses such as "I am socially awkward, I have poor interpersonal skills, I do not work well under pressure, etc.," which are also all true. What I should have been doing is mentioning real faults that I do possess, and immediately explain what I am doing to fix them. Third, I really don't have good answers to such questions as "what is the biggest risk you have taken, and what have you learned from it," and "tell me about a time when you had a dispute with a colleague, and explain how you overcame it." I don't take risks, and I haven't been in a real fight with a peer since my sophomore year of high school (my family is a different story). I typically just comply with others when I come into some form of potential conflict with them. This tends to work, because, frankly, I haven't had much worth getting in a fight over.
Frankly, parts of this interview reminded me of a passage from Nietzsche. The German philosopher derisively describes a man in love, who "asks himself whether the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not perhaps do so for a phantom of him; he wishes first to be thoroughly, indeed, profoundly well known; in order to be loved at all he ventures to let himself be found out. Only then does he feel the beloved one fully in his possession, when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for the sake of his devilry and concealed insatiability, as for his goodness, patience, and spirituality" (
Beyond Good and Evil, 194). Nietzsche hated this kind of thinking, and I think that it represents the mindset that I'm stuck in right now. I've been trying to reveal all of my holes, my faults, my shortcomings, etc., so that my interviewers know exactly whom they are agreeing to hire. However, I really should be trying to display my accomplishments (or lack thereof) in the best possible light, even if it means that I might feel as if I'm peddling spoiled goods. It also reminded me of something I heard from Robert McNamara in
The Fog of War. He said that when you're asked a difficult question, rather than answer the question that was just asked, you should instead answer the question you wish you had just answered. That certainly seems closer to what the career advisor was suggesting.
My resume needs to be completely redone. I'm in the process of this right now. In short, I've been using a template, and the career advisor told me that almost every resume with problems has its problems caused by its template. So I'm trashing it and rewriting it for my next potential employer. Furthermore, there were three activities that I hadn't even considered worthy of putting on the resume (my three semesters with EARS, my Slope Day volunteering, and my two and a half weeks at yeshiva in Tzfat). I might ask one of you, in the near future, to look over the draft of this resume.
I also learned about job opportunities of which I had been previously unawares. Again, too many to list now, but, hey, if I am accepted to any of them, you'll read about it :).
~JD
.png)
