Have you ever conducted an interview? Well I have and it’s hard. You have to prepare for it or it can go badly. For example, if you ask the interviewee to pause, the interviewee gets bored and answers the questions with no energy. Keep reading to find out why I did it …

When preparing for the interview, I first got about 10 questions on my own but then I had trouble getting more. At the end I got 3 more but then I realized there were some sample questions. I read some of them but then I got inspired by them and got 3 more. We were supposed to get 15 questions, so I asked my older sibling who had done the interview, to delete one of them she did. When my classmates shared their questions I got even more ideas but I realized I couldn’t add them. So then, I combined a few simple questions like Why and How together. When my teacher checked my questions she improved it by instead of “How” by “Describe”. An example of my question “Describe your first few days in America, including where you lived.” and “What feelings did you have when you left Turkey?”

My experience with the interview was meeting expectations. The interviewee was my mom so it was at our house and in person. I recorded each question separately because my mom said she had some work to do, so I did half at one time and the other half at another time. When conducting the interview I had a hard time asking follow-up questions, but after I listened to my recording I realized I could have asked at least 3 follow-up questions like “what was your first job?” or “Did you ever move around the USA?”. I regret not thinking about follow-up questions, if I had asked them I could have got a longer and better interview. I learned a few things I didn’t know about my mom. First, since I was born in Palo Alto, California I thought that’s where my mom came first, but she came to Rhode Island, Providence. Second, I thought my dad came to study at Stanford University first, but he went to Brown University first in the USA. 

In conclusion, the interview I expected to be very hard, just turned out to be not as hard as I thought. It turned out fine and the reason I conducted this was because….. for an immigration project.