Date: October 29, 2009
Time: 12:50-2:30PM
Location: VC-Multipurpose Room
This Career Planning workshop aims to teach students how to “ace” job interviews. The speaker is a psychologist who gives out a presentation on how to behave, speak, and dress during interviews and how to answer difficult, dreaded questions. The speaker also aims to give us techniques in being—or at least, pretending to be—confident in able to give out a good first impression.
I selected this workshop because I think that in able to be successful in business, you should be very good at presenting yourself to other people, to be able to communicate clearly and persuasively. It is that first meeting with the job interviewer that counts the most in getting that dream job because that interviewer determines the chance of you landing the title. Therefore, I chose this workshop to learn a few techniques and preparations for sitting through life-determining job interviews.
The workshop did not take me outside my comfort zone because I came with my friends to join in the fun of mock interviewing each other.
What’s not fun however is the length of the workshop: TWO long, hungry hours. That’s definitely something I expected because the time was provided in the list of the workshops on the website; however, I was hoping that they would at least serve snacks for those who didn’t get the chance to grab lunch. So despite the productive time of learning about basic interviewing skills, I was distracted away from the presentation by my hunger. If a student has the time before or after the workshop to grab lunch, then I definitely recommend this workshop.
Besides bringing a snack to school every day, I learned some valuable key tips in having a successful job interview. What especially caught my attention are the tiny details that job interviewers supposedly pay close attention to, like your body language and posture and the outfit you are wearing. During a job interview, I learned to have a good posture, to avoid fiddling, to wear box-shaped dress suits, to not wear distracting jewelry or make any fashion statement whatsoever, to give a firm and very specific hand shake, and most importantly to look at the job interviewer between his or her eyebrows to create the illusion of constant eye contact.