W05 Assignment: Conduct Practice Interviews
Overview
Purpose: Demonstrate your technical interviewing skills.
Ideally, this week, you would conduct three interviews with real companies. However, because it may be difficult to arrange three of these interviews in person, for this assignment you will instead practice three interviews with friends or family.
Please keep in mind that these three practice interviews are different from the informational interviews you are conducting during this course. The informational interviews should be arranged with businesses or entrepreneurs in your area. The practice interviews in this assignment are done with friends or family members and will help you prepare for your other interviews.
Progress on your Informational Interviews
By the end of this week, you need to report on the first of your actual informational interviews. (You need to report on the other two by the end of next week.)
If you have not already completed all three interviews, you should contact at least five additional people this week. This assignment submission will ask you to report on your progress with these interviews.
Instructions
Conduct three practice interviews with friends or family to practice your answering behavioral-based questions.
Develop Three STAR Model Ideas
To prepare for your practice interviews, and for times in the future when you have actual job interviews, complete the following:
- Find a job posting online for a job that interests you.
- Identify three skills needed for this job.
- For each of the three, think about a time in your life that you have demonstrated this skill.
- For each of the three, identify the Situation, Task, Action, and Result you saw.
You will include this information in your assignment submission document.
Identify People who can Interview You
For this assignment you will conduct three practice interviews. These can be with anyone that you would like, including a friend or family member, regardless of whether that person has technical skills in your area.
You need to complete three practice interviews, so it may be best to think about about 5 people, in case some are not available.
Not sure who to contact?
For these practice interviews, you can choose anyone, including friends, family members, people at church, neighbors, etc.
If you are having trouble coming up with ideas, please contact your instructor for suggestions.
Conduct Three Practice Interviews
Once you have identified people that can interview you, the next step is to complete these interviews.
Complete the following:
- Complete at least three separate practice interviews with a friend or family member.
- You should spend at least 15 minutes for each interview.
- In addition to any other questions they would like to ask, please have your friend ask at least a few from this list of common questions:
- Tell me about yourself?
- What is one of your strengths?
- What is one of your weaknesses?
- Tell me about a time when you had to overcome a difficult technical problem.
- Tell me about a time when you had to overcome a disagreement or conflict with other people.
- Tell me about a project you have worked on. What was one of the most difficult parts of the project? Why did you choose to do it the way you did?
- (After any other response) Can you give me a specific example of a time when you have done that?
- At the end of each interview, you should ask your friend or family member the following question:
- What do you think I could do better next time?
Fill out the Assignment Report Document
Download the Week 05 Assignment Report document. Fill out each section in the assignment report document.
Submission
After you have finished the instructions above:
- Return to Canvas to submit the document.
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