I'm not even the one being interviewed. I am the one conducting the interview.
I have 40 questions already written out — which, by the way, is way too many for a 60-minute interview. But I have a tendency to overprepare.
This interview is the first of nine that I'll be conducting with brand managers at nonprofits for my master's research project, which is called, unsurprisingly, A Look at the Brand-Building Efforts of Nonprofit Organizations.
I think my nervousness stems from my sense that I don't know what I'm talking about. I have this expectation that I'll be halfway through my interviews, and my interviewees will realize that I know nothing and that they can provide no more information to someone whose frame of reference for this sort of thing is so very small.
Never mind that I have literally spent months doing background research. Never mind that the whole purpose of research is to learn more about something that you don't know enough about. I am lacking in experience, and WHAT IF THEY CAN TELL? Or what if I don't glean any useful information? What if none of my interviews can be tied to each other in logical ways? WHAT IF NO PATTERNS EMERGE? What if I interview and transcribe and code and categorize and compare and can't come up with anything!? WHAT IF NOBODY ELSE COMMITS TO AN INTERVIEW AND I DON'T GET ENOUGH DATA!?
These are the thoughts in my brain — now 12 minutes out from my interview.
I can be really silly sometimes.
You're gonna do great!
ReplyDeleteI don't know, I always felt stupid doing J-School interviews, but the point is kinda to be able to explain things to someone who doesn't know anything about the subject, so I felt okay a lot of the time just being like, "Ok, pretend I am your average person who has no idea what you're talking about. Explain it to me."
How was it?
ReplyDeleteAlso you should do more correction of grammar of celebs. Love it.