The past few weeks have been some of the busiest of my life. Really at this point I’m just gunning for the end of October. But they’ve been a great past few weeks. Everything I’ve been doing I’ve enjoyed being busy with. Most of it has involved interviewing, where I’ve found myself on both sides of the table. As the interviewer, I’ve been in charge of running general body interviews for Camp Kesem. Over the course of two weeks, we interviewed over 150 Penn Staters. It’s been a huge time commitment, totaling nearly 35 hours of interviews and 8 or so hours of deliberation to hear all our applicants and make our final decisions. We had some great interviews. Some not so great ones. Some funny, some sad, and some just plain weird (like when we had a math teacher barge into our room and try to take it over). But at the end of the day, I am so proud of our team of four and all the hard work we put into this process.

Through these two weeks, I gained a lot of respect for what it’s like to be on the other side of the table running the interview. It’s stressful. And it’s so hard to make decisions among so many qualified applicants. It also made me realize some important things about the interview process as an interviewee. At least for us, we highly valued people acting naturally and like themselves, not simply telling us the answers we wanted to hear. We also really appreciated people with a unique story, or something that set them apart from the field.

This knowledge was put to use for me during my most recent interview with Merck this past weekend. My final round with them was on-site in Philadelphia this past week. It was a three-part interview. One hour-long behavioral interview, one hour and a half group case study, and one hour-long white board presentation. The white board presentation was the most unique one, where we were given a blank white board, and 30 minutes to prepare and 30 minutes to present. We were given the simple instructions to “tell our story.” I had so much fun with this presentation because it gave me a chance to get creative, which I think can be a drastically underrepresented skill in the engineering world.

That interview with Merck was intense, and certainly a long day. The results are still out, I should hear back next week, but I’m excited and hopeful for the results. It was one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever been a part of, and one that I’m certainly proud of. Hopefully I’ll be able to report back in a couple weeks with good results, but either way it’s all been a great learning experience!