Speaker 1: All right, so welcome back to the second video on my interview tips series for an exchange program interview. My name is Austin. You're watching Otter Space Productions. And in this video, I'm going to be talking about the things that you're going to want to know or best prepare for or do once you're actually inside of the interview space. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to step into the room. You're going to see the chair that you're sitting in. Maybe it's one person. Maybe it's a panel. And your heart's going to drop. Your heart rate's going to increase. You're going to forget just everything. Now, here is where you're going to take control of the situation. You're going to recognize that your heartbeat increasing is just adrenaline, and you can actually use adrenaline to your benefit. You're going to shake any nerves you have out, and you're just going to take one step after the other. Come in strong. Shake their hands. Say hello. Sit down. Deep breath. Let's get started with the video. All right, so just like in the last video, give this video a thumbs up if this is high-value information for you and things that you think are going to be helpful, and make sure you leave a comment if you have any further questions or let me know what program you're on or you're applying for, where you're going, what you're excited about, what you're nervous about, anything else under the sun. We can have a discussion down there. All right, so first thing on this list, and something that's very, very important, is going to be monitoring and controlling your body language, your nonverbal signaling during your interview. Now, this is something I should have brought up in my last video on preparation, but I'll talk about it now real quick. Before you interview, make sure that you find an audience with someone and can do mock interviews and practice with them, and ask them to be very critical about the body language that you're using. How is your posture? Do you have a nervous tick? How is your pacing? Are you making good eye contact? These are things that you're going to need to know prior to. That way, during your interview, you can keep a constant inventory of, oh, am I making good eye contact? Oh, am I sitting up straight? Oh, if I'm in a swiveled chair, am I keeping my feet planted? And all these little signals that you're going to be giving off, you're going to want to have complete control over those. All right, so next up is actually going to be a continuation of having good body language, and this is going to be just be human. And remember that the people interviewing you are also human. We're all just people with very similar motivations and experiences. While this is a very professional thing that you're doing, you still want to connect with people on a human emotional level. So don't get lost in professionalism and really miss that connection. What I mean by this is that you don't want to be informal, but you don't want to be a robot. You can laugh and make jokes and smile and kind of build on what they've said and have a little bit of a narrative and a dialogue with people you're interviewing. You want to make this as personable as possible. You want to have a personal connection with people interviewing you because you're going to stick in their heads as a much better candidate if you do that. So number three on this list just might be the most important thing in a exchange program interview. That is, are you adaptable and can you communicate just how adaptable you are? You have to be adaptable for these kinds of programs. These people interviewing you need to know that you're not going to lose your cool during your exchange year just because you're not fitting in or you're having problems with the host family or you can't quite stick it with the culture. If you're not an adaptable person right now, you need to start putting yourself in positions where you are outside of your comfort zone, keeping an open mind and learning to adapt to them. You need to be adaptable and you're going to want to use really solid examples of experiences you've had where you've been met with challenges and adapting to those challenges was how you've overcome them. I cannot stress this enough. Adaptability should be your battle cry. It should be the flag you're waving as you cross the finish line. Be adaptable. All right, number four on this list is to be optimistic and to communicate your optimism and spend about zero percent of your time complaining about anything. Do not be a complainer. This is one of the biggest turnoffs for an interviewing panel to have any candidate spend any amount of time complaining about how they were annoyed by something or how an experience they just didn't like, but don't mention how they learned from it or overcame it. Just be optimistic. Show that you're a positive energy. That's what's going to bring you into this program and it's what's going to allow you to have a good year once you're there. Start practicing optimism if you're not already in that habit and don't complain about anything in your interview. All right so next up we're going to get really into the the meat of the interview which is going to be the types of questions that the interviewers might ask you. Now for an exchange program you can anticipate that most questions will be behavioral based, meaning that they will give you an example of a scenario or a situation and they will ask, given this scenario, how would you react? Now you have a lot of freedom to react here in many different ways, to respond in many different ways, but what you should do is you should try to align your answers with some personal examples where you've perhaps faced similar challenges. Now this is just to once again to communicate how adaptable you are and you should use something called the STAR method which is Situation, Task, Action, and Results. I will put a link in for this but this is a very important method. What this means is that you say okay well I anticipate I will react like this because in my personal life, in my experiences, I was in a situation where you know I had to you know I had to rewrite the entire yearbook a few days before it was due. These are the tasks that... All right so another thing, you're going to want to keep your answers as concise and as clear as possible. No one really wants to listen to anyone else ramble on about something when they're looking for more concrete examples. I would say don't go more than two or three minutes on any particular point or story without getting some feedback from someone in the jury. This will keep it open as well for the jury to talk more. People like to hear themselves talk and so that'll actually build a better relationship between you and the interviewer if you give them some space to talk about themselves. All right so finally at the end of your interview make sure you have questions to ask. This is very important. You can prepare these but more importantly perhaps try to adapt your questions based on the things that keep coming up during the interview. For example, if they keep asking you behavioral situation-based questions that have a particular theme or kind of line up in a certain way, you can ask, you know, in the past how have participants dealt with challenges like that? I'm just excited to best prepare myself to be adaptable during this experience. Questions like that will be really helpful because the panel might even be made up of former participants in some capacity so giving them the opportunity of the floor again to talk about themselves will only just really help you out. All right folks, well that's it from me. This list is by no means exhaustive so if you have more questions I'll try to answer them the best I can in the comment section down below. Thank you so much for watching. Best of luck with your interview. Look up more resources if you have more questions. Like really just build a base for yourself where you can stand on the shoulders of giants here and really just really knock this interview out of the park. Anyway, my name is Austin. This is Outerspace Productions and we'll see you next time. So take care. Good luck.