Interviewing, haha!

Today was my first 'proper' experience interviewing students. It was for the SIEP, our department's native technical society.

I was a little apprehensive at first but soon transitioned into an interviewer proper. I had only a vague idea of what to ask. I was sceptical about the level of the questions I would ask since my technical knowledge as yet is quite lagging in phase to the senior students'.

Still, I braced. It was completely impromptu and I surprised myself with smoothly getting into the flow of talk! I asked Q's I thought were relevant. All of us in the panel of five were slightly apprehensive at the start, and each of us somehow asked only from a particular domain in the beginning. But after a few candidates were done with, the atmosphere changed visibly. We became more comfortable and began to pick up each other's points. For instance, one would start asking about the function of the stabilizer, and the others would begin the process of cross-questioning and somewhere in between, a new topic would pop up.

There were some funny incidents too. There was a guy who jay-walked in, literally; hands in pockets, shabby jeans, jiggle in the walk. Yeah, I'm an engineer. Right.

We asked him about the methods used for circuit analysis and he receded somewhere deep within as if on a spiritual quest. 'Umm, there's Thevenin, we just did Norton, I guess? Oh yeah, and there's mesh analysis too!’ Amid his talking we spotted the chewing gum in his mouth. It became visible at an odd angle and God!did we have a long laugh afterward!

Then there was another guy who didn't even know what the society stood for proper, and was like, 'Yeah, choose me. I'll see later what I can do'. 'Hmm, so can you pin-point a talent for which you should be preferred?' 'I don't know, is this the kind of stuff you ask?' I mean, :|

He was acting like he was doing someone a favour just showing up!

Today I learnt that keeping some things spontaneous without prior preparation has a charm all its own. And I cannot emphasize enough the unique beauty of the experience of a group-talk. And a little sheepishly, of confusing the person in front with rapid questioning!

Perhaps we haven't yet outgrown our ancestors' affinity for story-telling after all.