Interview

So last week I had my first ever proper interview, technically it wasn't a job interview it was an interview for a PhD studentship but it was my first experience of that sort of thing. I had taken part in mock interviews before, once in high school at a career day and once at university. The career day was a special day organised by the school where we came in dressed for a job interview (though of course I ended up being the only guy who didn't already have a suit and who didn't rush out to get one just for this one day) and then we were split into groups and assigned to a professional from the local area who interviewed each of us individually. I was in a group with two other girls, one who wanted to be a speech therapist (slightly ironic) and I'm not sure what the other one wanted to be, this was back when i wanted to be a vet. It went really well and I was complimented on how calm I was but that may have been because I knew it was a mock interview so I didn't feel under pressure. My mock interview at university did not go as well in fact it was pretty awful. In my defense my supervisor only let me know about it the day before and given that I had plenty else on my plate I didn't exactly prepare for it.

The interview I had on Tuesday was a bit different again since it was a four person panel. Along with the other references we let them know about my hearing and speech issues and whenever I was invited to interview they suggested bringing someone along. I ended up deciding that my mum would be the best person to bring, in my head I thought that she would be there just in case. I forgot due to people I know being used to me and being able to understand me for the majority of the time that I am hard to understand if you aren't used to me. This meant my confidence was knocked a bit whenever I started to answer the first question only to be stopped and told that they were struggling to understand me and asked could my mum help out. It ended up with my mum essentially "translating" everything I said. This meant that I didn't get as much across as I would have liked in the first section but thankfully I managed to recover and I think the rest of the interview went pretty well. It was a good experience and hopefully I will get the studentship but it makes me nervous about future interviews in terms of communication obviously I can't always or I won't always be allowed to bring my mum or another person in with me.

Quite a strange experience especially since it was my first time

Thanks for reading.