My Magic Suit

It's been really busy here. Classes ended last week, now we need to work on our papers, which I plan on getting to shortly. I don't know where the time goes but somehow my week always fills up.

Last week I bought a suit for the first time in my life last week. With the International Conference this week, and job interviews coming up it seemed like the right time. I had my first opportunity to wear it today while attending a conference put on by the UN on how to get a job with them.

The conference was located in a Belgian federal building in a huge underground conference room. There were rows of desks with microphones and headphones, presumably for translator services. Even though the UN didn't own this room, it looked exactly like one would expect a UN room to look like. Two long term UN employees put on the seminar to about 200 prospective employees, which was to last about 3 hours. The conference humming along like you'd expect, with some information about the UN and some basic job hunting advice. Then they started talking about the telephone interview that all prospective candidates would have to take. One of the women asked for a volunteer. No one raised their hand after a few seconds so I raised mine. My new suit gives me false confidence, I guess. After repeatedly asking the audience for another volunteer another girl was selected. We were led to the head of the room, given a microphone and told to turn our chairs around to face the wall, to simulate being on the phone I guess.

The girl was asked a question about how she approaches teamwork and to name a specific time that she was a member of a team, what her role was, how the process was developed, what the outcome was, and what could've been done better. It was quite an in depth question, and she was trembling but she gave a pretty good answer to all of the parts to the question, considering the circumstance. When she was finished, the moderator asked the audience what she could've done better, and they duly gave a laundry list on where she could've improved her answer. It was a bit savage to lay upon an unsuspecting volunteer, in my mind.

Hmm. Tough crowd. Then it was my turn. They asked me the same question, except that it was for event planning, my role, the outcome, etc. Event planning is not exactly my strong suit. Actually I don't remember planning an event in any professional context so I had to go to my "B" material. After thinking for a second, I regaled (possible exaggeration) the audience with a story on how I had helped organize the first University of Kent Beer Pong tournament. Beer Pong is a college drinking game that we the student government had organized into a tournament as a fund raiser. I elaborated on how I helped pick out the trophy and how I felt that the only downside was the amount of drunk students that where wandering around the neighborhood afterward. My suit gives me a bit of a smart-mouth, I guess.

I turned around and both moderators came at me with every criticism they could find, from the length of my answer to my posture in the chair (Hey I thought this was a telephone interview and we were supposed to be comfortable?). Neither one was amused, but I did see some smiles from the audience, whatever that was worth. I had a good time at the conference today, but I am not expecting a call back from the UN.