I got her name, so I guess I could find her if I wanted to, but she lived really far away, same with a lot of the other cool people I met during the process.
Oh f*ck honestly I'm glad I came across your thread :p also do you still keep in contact with the girl who you befriended or was it more of an in the moment thing?
Honestly no, because I'm not really good at on-the-spot kinda questions and that was what it seemed to be more about. It was interesting to hear what other people had to say though and what their instincts in certain situations would be, though.
This was a good story I'm glad to have read this. Did you like the idea of a group interview? I can somewhat understand the idea of it but overall I'd disagree with it (Also as someone who has driven through Atlanta around the same time last year I can feel your pain "OH YOU WANT A PARKING SPOT HAHA...ENJOY WAITING AN HOUR")
We were then told to look at our schedules and map of of the building so that we could find everything else too, and I saw that I had a break for the first hour. So, I talked to some current students that were in the program, and they ranged from a lot of ages, but they were all female. I got a lot of good information about GRA's and GA's (assistanceships), how the classes functions, how classes generally are, what to expect from the interviews, and just chilled out thinking about what I could say to stand out from everyone else that was interviewing.
Then I went to the group interview first, and it was kinda overwhelming because I didn't anticipate it to be a 20-person interview, but we were to answer a couple of questions all as a group and then split up into 3 smaller groups and addressed a problem and said what we would do in that situation.
After that I had my two other interviews and they went okay, but there's really no telling. I can't help but feel I didn't do well enough. There were a lot of people that talked a lot more than me and took words right out of my mouth before I could say them in the group interview, and then in the one on one interviews, I'm not sure if I communicated what I wanted to say well enough, but I guess in time will tell. At the very least I'm glad I got to go through the interview process and know what to expect and what types of questions to expect for the next school I may or may not have to apply to.
Traffic was kinda hellish on the way home, and I thought I could stay awake for a bit longer into the night but I ended up passing out at around 11.
So me and that girl that I met before go and sit down anyway because they tell us that they'll get our stuff to us and we don't have to move and that they're sorry about the mix-up.
So we sit down, and two other ladies sit in front of us and to the left of me (we're at the end of the U of tables) and talk and get to know them before we have to learn anything. Overall, that aspect of the interview process was really cool, learning about people and their backgrounds and why they're here. I felt kinda intimidated because most people were in their mid 20's or 30's. There were some people that I could guess were even older, too.
We were then sat down and they essentially said someting along the lines of "you should be celebrating that you've made it this far because we had almost 200 applicants and have narrowed it down to around 60, but we can only accept 30 into the program, so only 50% of you will be in the final group". And that blew my mind, because for some reason I thought if you were cleared for an interview you were basically in the program. They said that this was probably the most competitive program they had in the Education graduate area, and I could kinda see why.
The other girl was like "yeah there was a mix-up with my email too and you signed off on it". So the head-lady asks me "can you show me the email?" And I showed her the entire email string, and she goes oh I get it, my partner signed off on it and didn't tell me, so she leaves for a little bit and comes back and says: "Okay it's totally not your faults, and you will still get interviews, but with how everything is set up, our only open spaces are in the second interviewing round." And I was like oh okay when is that? And she's like "12:30 pm". And I'm like oh okay I'll come back then! And in the back of my head I'm like what am I supposed to do in downtown Atlanta for the next four hours?
So me and my new friend (the girl from earlier) walk up the street to a nearby coffeeshop for breakfast, and I honestly wasn't hungry but I got a drink anyway since I hadn't had anything yet. We called our parents and let them know about the situation, and after the whole junk mail thing and now this I was really thinking about how organized the program may be in general and if it's worth it, and my mom told me that if I had any interest in maybe going to the program there I should stay and do it, and that surprised me because she had shown doubts about the program as a whole, but if she was able to put that aside even in this sort of case then I kinda decided that I should too.
My phone was getting kinda low at this point so I decided I would just go back to the parking lot and sit in my car and charge my phone at random intervals since honestly it was too cold to walk around. I tell some of my friends what happened, and other than that I just waste time in my car for 4 hours until it's time to go back up, and then I go back up and they still don't have my f*cking nametag.
So around 30 till the time of the interview I decide to head inside, and as I do, the lady at the front told me what floor and room it was on so I took the elevator and made it up there.
It was a really spacious commons for what I believed to be the interview. There were three long tables lined up like a "U" and chairs all around them on both sides. There were a few girls who were current grad students in the program getting people to sign their names and put down email and phone numbers. After you signed in they told us to get a cup and a name tag. So I went over to where the name tags and folders and cups were and they were in alphabetical order, so I go from where my last name is and it's not there. So I'm like oh maybe they're not in alphabetical order, so I scan the rest of the names and it's not there.
I go to the front and ask the receptionist what I should do and she said oh okay I'll get the head of the interview process, and after she's about to go another girl shows up right next to me and says the same thing about her nametag not being over there. So, we're just standing their awkwardly and getting to know each other while we wait for the other woman to show up, and when she does, she asks me for my name again and I tell her. She's checking a clipboard of registered names and I can read on her face that she's super confused. She goes "what's your name again?" and I tell her and she's like "are you sure you're in the right place?" And I'm like yeah you're "___" right? You signed off on my email giving me the information for this interview and you also helped me out with the whole junk mail thing, and she looked so confused.
Okay story time! I don't know how long this is gonna be and I haven't drafted it so this could be pretty long.
Yesterday I had my interview for the grad program that invited me that I had lost their email in my junk mail. It's located in downtown Atlanta, and the traffic is infamous there. It's like an unspoken thing around where I've grown up that driving to Atlanta is super dangerous and if you get in a wreck there you're probably going to die due to the high speeds and traffic stuff. I was honestly more worried about that than the interview itself because I've never driven in Atlanta before, and you also hear the horror stories of people being stuck in traffic for like 2 hours, so I was worried even about being able to get there in an apt amount of time.
So I left my place at 5:30 am in order to dodge all the traffic or at least in case that something bad happened like someone else having a wreck I would have enough time to allow myself to get there on time.
It honestly wasn't that bad. Maybe I was just lucky but it wasn't hard to learn how to deal with the traffic and the large number of lanes, except I did miss my exit a couple of times. I got there within an hour and a half, so I got there about an hour and a half early for my interview, so I called my parents and told them I didn't die on the way and just sat in my car thinking about what to say.
Another issue with the Myers Briggs is test-retest reliability, that being that if you take the test at different times, you should get the same result. But, there've been studies conducted where participants take the test once and then take it 5 weeks later and 50% of the time they got different personality types. That shouldn't happen. In fact, I think every time I take it I get something slightly different, which puts me often into a completely different personality type than before.
Back to how the Myers Briggs is a little too narrow in scope; there is no middle area between the poles. You're either labeled as one extreme or the other. So if you get an I, you're an introverted, and if you get an E you're an extravert, which is pretty inaccurate if you think about the variability of extroversion that you can see in people around you. All personality traits lie on a continuum from 0-100%, so the Myers Briggs does a pretty poor job of capturing that as well.
So one of the fundamental issues with the Myers Briggs test is that it's way too narrow in scope. You get one of 16 personality types that put you at once of the extremes for each of the 4 categories and then that's your personality. I'd also argue that half of the "qualities" that it measures are not really on a continuum. For example, "sensing" and "feeling" are on the same simplex but they're not really opposites of each other, so what's the sense in being one or the other?
The way the Big Five (OCEAN) Inventory is created is that they took a comprehensive list of like hundreds of traits and ran correlation tests on them to see if there were any underlying connections between the words, and what came out of running these associations were 5 big themes of personality, which you can tie any other personality trait as a facet of one or more of the big five. You can't really do that with Myers Briggs as it doesn't measure really most of what is understood to be your personality.
I'm curious what makes Myers-Briggs less reliable than other personality tests.
To me they're all kind of the same. None of them can accurately describe your personality because there's always more categories that make up your personality than any particular test accounts for. They all just kind of sort you based on the variables they test for, which is interesting but not quite enlightening.
