Recently, I applied for the graduate life fellow position at my university. Graduate life fellows are graduate students who represent their departments to help other graduate students with their problems, conduct various events in their respective departments, and help build the graduate community.
Around 30 students from the applicant pool were selected for the 1st round of interview. This was a group interview-- where a group of interviewees are interviewed together in order to help the interviewers further narrow down the candidate list. The interviewees are asked to perform various group activities in order to assess their leadership and communication skills.
This was my very first group interview. So, I did not know what to expect. I prepared myself with the help of various online resources. I convinced myself not to be nervous, telling myself, in case I did not make it to the next round, I would at least be taking away a lot of experience with me.
As I entered the room, I found myself confronting a group of formally dressed individuals. I took a quick glace at myself--and reassured myself that I looked great. I have never been good at formal dressing. It was awkward since nobody was talking to each other. The interviewers were all there, glancing and smiling at each one of us. They had their grading sheets ready in their hands. Each one of them introduced themselves to us, and talked about the purpose of the interview.
The interview started off with an ice breaker activity. Each one of us had to introduce ourselves and answer the following three questions:
1) Unique thing about yourself?
2) Pet peeve - what annoys you the most?
3) An extreme sport that you played?
It was very hard for me to instantly come up with answers. My answers were as follows:
1) Unique thing about yourself?
I'm funny, and patient (have a good tolerance/perseverance level). I like to self learn new things in my free time.
2) Pet peeve - what annoys you the most?
Racism and rudeness.
3) An extreme sport that you played?
Fasting--if it were a sport. Many people in the U.S are astonished when I tell them that I am fasting and that I am not allowed to eat or drink from dawn to dusk.
We were then split up into two groups (6 and 7 members respectively) to perform two activities. Each activity was designed to test our team player spirit and how well we performed in a group. The committee was continuously observing us and taking notes.
The first activity involved touching numbers on pieces of papers glued on a carpet. The numbers had to be touched in a specific order in the shortest duration possible (in less than a minute). Each paper had a number written on it. At a time, only one person could touch a number on the carpet. The number was either represented as an equation, symbol, or as an english word. For example, 1 as UNO, 2 as too, 3 as the math symbol pi(3.142), 27 as 3x3x3, and 12 as a dozen eggs. Before the beginning of the activity, each one of us was given envelopes with pieces of the overall instructions and penalties in them. We had to join these pieces together and come of with a plan of how to perform the activity. One of our group members said that this task was in a way similar to the twister game. I had never heard of this game. We were given 3 chances to improve our time duration. Our times for the three rounds were 1.47 min, 1.8 min, and 46 sec respectively. We were told that we had been the fastest so far among all the groups.
The second activity presented us with a scenario and we had to come up with the best solution as a team. We were each handed a paper describing a scenario in which a group of people were out for hiking and were suddenly stuck in a blizzard and their minivan got damaged. They could not drive back home because of the snow and car damage. Their best bet was to spend the night over and leave tomorrow after the snow had stopped. The hikers had 15 items with them for survival. We had to rank the 15 items in order of their importance for the group's survival. These items were beef perky, blanket, shovel, hoses, knife, sunglasses, suv mirror, map of directions, compass, shotgun, cooking pot, lighter, gasoline, first aid kit, and gloves. We had to compare our individual ranking with the one we came up as a team. The interviewer then told us what the optimal solution was according to experts and how close we were to them. This was an interesting activity for me and I learnt some great survival tips.
At the end of these activities, we met the other group again and chatted with the interviewers and gave them our feedback regarding the activities. As I left the room, I was unsure of how well I did and whether I will get selected for the next round, but somehow I felt great. A few days later, I got an email saying that I had been selected for the final individual interview :-)
