Korner Talk

So I gave my interview for MSU this morning. In short, I sucked it. Here is what I learned.

• The interview was at 9:30 am. EST. This meant that I had to wake up at 5:45 to clear my cobwebs and scratchy morning voice to ready myself for the interview at 6:30 PST. Knowing that my brain is not fully functional that early in the morning, I should have scheduled an interview that was later in the day (although I don’t recall there being any). Instead, I was piecing together my answers as I stumbled through the interview.

  Lesson Learned: Avoid early morning interviews or scheduling an interview as the first event of the day.

• The interview was over the phone. Having visited Broad in November, I didn’t want to drop more cash on another trip to East Lansing. Moreover, getting out of work right now is highly frowned upon by the bosses. But if my last phone interview from several years back was an indication of how I would do today, I should have ponied up the dough and flown out to MSU. I’ve never liked phone interviews because I can’t see who I’m talking to and I can’t play off of their physical reactions. More simply, however, I just don’t like talking on the phone but I thought I could pull it off.

  Lesson Learned: Avoid phone interviews.

• They say that the last interview is your best because by then you’ve already honed your answers to a fine edge. I think I bought too much into that line of thought and underestimated the amount of practice I needed. Needless to say, I was more like a dull knife than a Ginsu.

  Lesson Learned: Practice. Practice. And then practice some more. Did someone say practice?

What happened this morning was a disappointing way to close out the last thing I had to do for my apps. But as my mom would say, “What happened has happened so move on and learn from it”. Now it’s just a waiting game. Tick-Tock. Tick-Tock.