Dressing up for an interview

The mock interview was a new experience for me. I have participated in interview for jobs, and for my scholarship to Mount Saint Mary, but I have never took part in a mock interview. Before going into it, I was unsure about the type of questions I should expect to be asked, and how the overall feel of the interview would be. I thought that because it was a group of some of my closest friends interviewing me, it would be hard to "get in the moment," and forget that they are my friends interviewing me.

This is an example of the faces I do NOT want to see while
interviewing for a job. 

This is an example of the faces that I DO want to see while
interviewing for a job.

Overall, I thought the interview was a good experience that had a real feel of a job interview. I liked the array of different questions that were asked from each "interviewer," and I surprised myself with my own responses to some of the questions. Some examples of questions that stuck out to me are 'If you had to give education a color, which color would you pick?,' and 'If you had to choose an animal, what would you choose?' Although at first I thought these questions were unrelated to anything that would be asked at a job interview, I changed my mind once I started to hear the responses from the members of my group, and myself. An extremely important aspect of having a successful job interview is to be able to think quickly, and critically. In order to do this, it is important to have practice answering obscure and strange questions; this is exactly what this mock interview helped me with. When giving a job interview, the interviewer is not necessarily looking for the best answer to the questions but instead, is looking at the thought process, and the way that the interviewee responds to the question. This was the biggest thing that I got out of this experience.

Sometimes, the difference between a successful and unsuccessful job interview can be as trivial as not making eye contact, or having a incomplete resume. This experience helped me to think about these things in a different way than I have previously. My hope is that when I am interviewed for my dream job, I can use what I learned from this mock interview, and impress the interviewer with my ability to answer the questions thoughtfully, and critically.