Shannon shares her experience with the OshKosh Placement Exchange
I’m writing this from the Oshkosh Placement Exchange. It’s day 2 here, and a bit calmer than yesterday. Yesterday was a live showing of “The All RA Floor” and it was intense. A little overwhelming when you walk in and there’s not a bare inch of wall space left uncovered by posters and advertisements and fliers enticing you to apply at a certain school. There’s cheering in the lounges, and everyone keeps hugging and smiling for twelve hours straightand it’s a bit tiring. But fun, don’t get me wrong. This whole weekend experience has been fun.
Yesterday was the first day, and I had six interviews scheduled. My first was one at 10 am, and I was surprised how calm I felt while sitting in the lounge waiting for them to come call my name. I was thinking by that point the nerves would have set in, but I had the really good advice of knowing that I was interviewing them as much as they were interviewing me. I know that sounds incredibly cheesy, but it really did keep me calm. I knew I could go into these interviews and be myself and that any school would know exactly what they were getting. And if they didn’t like who that was, I was okay with that, because I feel really confident in my experiences.
Some interviews went really well, and it was hard to not do some fist pumps as soon as I was out of the room, or to restrain myself from dancing down the hallway back to the elevators. Some interviews just flowed nicely and I got along with the interview teams well and I had lots of personal things to write in a thank you note. Other interviews I walked out of feeling kind of “meh” about. For whatever reason – personality, hearing more about the job, having a curveball question- just left me with a feeling like while it could have been better, it probably could have been worse. There’s only been one interview so far where I walked out feeling rather ambiguous towards the position. While they didn’t seem interested or engaged during the interview itself, as I was leaving afterward they were very fun and friendly about the social and seeing me again. Out of the first day of interviews I got two second interviews, bringing my total for Day 2 to six interviews.
It’s hard to believe right now that it’s already 3 pm, yet I’m only halfway through my day. I have two more interviews this afternoon, then an evening full of socials. I’m going to suggest a future professional development on mingling, because it’s so hard for me to walk right up to someone and start up a conversation when we’ve already talked for an hour, and have been conversing through thank you notes in mailboxes. Hopefully it goes well though.
My apologies for such a rambling sort of blog post. It’s been a very long and very busy two days. You’ll all be excited to know that I did name drop the #sachat in one interview, and they were really intrigued by the concept of free, weekly professional development. So good job to all of you – the word is spreading!
