Julia TS #15 (Wei)

Julia TS #15 (Wei) 

Date/Time: Friday, July 17, 4–5 pm 


Location: Student Union 


Topic/Skill: American-style job interview/ the ability to engage and communicate in a 1-on-1 interview and tell stories that showcase your abilities and skills. 


Feedback Provided to the Tutee: We continued practicing for Wei’s upcoming job interview, and continued practicing using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to mentally organize responses, and practiced and recorded Wei’s responses to questions like 

  1. Tell me a little about yourself. 

  2. What are your strengths? 

  3. What are your weaknesses? 

We wrote out her responses to these questions and rehearsed her answers. We used recordings and listened for pacing, filler words, and clarity. 


Lesson(s) About Tutoring and/or the Tutee You Learned: In this session, I learned the importance of recording responses to target awkward phrasing or pacing and specific sentences that don’t sound good. I also became increasingly aware of the subtleties and intricacies of the questions interviewers ask in the United States, and of how the process of interviewing for employment unsurprisingly differs greatly across cultures. In job interviews in the United States, interviews are expecting you to, in essence, “sell yourself” and confidently talk about your self-achievements. Yet this practice might come across as boastful in other cultures. U.S. interviewers are also focused on work culture and whether an applicant might be a good fit for it, and thus have more casual conversations and ask more personal questions about an interviewee's passions or hobbies. In this session, it became clear to me the importance of education in reducing these pervasive cultural barriers. 

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