Interview Guru?

My friend Ev instant messaged me the other day and she asked for help regarding her impending internship interviews. I don't know I how gained the reputation of being some sort of interview guru (perhaps I started that one myself) and when I tried to refute that fact, she thought I was being modest. Her words screamed of her fear of the interview, the fear of saying all the wrong things. I knew this fear all too well; the same fear muddies your thoughts and suffocates your self-confidence. Horrible crippling fear. The best advice I could give her was to relax.

The interviewers can smell your fear.

We college students are so notorious for being incredibly high strung and stressed out. It takes a little while to finally realize that you have sometimes accept what happened.

I learned from it. I move on.

One moment that has always stuck out among my memories is one from elementary school art class. The art teacher, Ms. Sumner, had no real classroom and instead taught from either her cart which she pushed from room to room or the random table set up in some corner of the school. The assignment is to draw a picture any picture in pencil, but you weren't allowed to use your eraser at all. No eraser!? I freaked out a little.

"Incorporate your mistakes in the picture," she told us. What's done is done. There is no eraser to use to fix the mistakes you made. You just have to work with them. This teaches you to be more careful about each mark, each movement of your pencil. As long as you didn't use an eraser and you tried your very best, Ms. Sumner gave you full credit for a stick figure drawing or an artistic masterpiece. So stop dwelling on your mistakes. Keep drawing. Don't ever throw it all away. Keep drawing.