Reflection on Conducting Interviews

After conducting the interviews for the interview exercise and my project, the experiences are quite different between the two. Thus, I was trying to figure out the reasons for that and this might give everyone some insights about how to conduct interview.

For the interview exercise, we have to find three international students in CBE to ask them about their experience in ANU. We did the interviews in one afternoon all in ones and the process was not very enjoyable. Firstly, as we were trying to randomly pick students in CBE, we literally just stop one student and ask them whether they are willing to take the interview. Then, bringing them to one lecture theatre and conduct the interview. During the interview, you had to keep asking questions to encourage them not to stop talking. Otherwise, they would just give you very short answers or sometimes just become silent. This was frustrating as if we were trying to come up with a lot of questions, the interview was highly driven by us and it seemed like we were pushing and limiting their answers to what we would like to get. These aspects made the interviews seem to be a bit unreal. Sometimes, the interviewees seemed to not understand your questions and the answers was just not related or relevant to your questions. Finally, these interviews were relatively short as well as you could sense that for some interviewees, they didn’t really take the interview serious and were not willing to think about your questions carefully before answering it.

I think there might be several factors that can explain this experience.

• Because this is an ad hoc interview, the interviewees are not prepared to be interviewed. Even though they consent to do the interview, they might not be willing to put to make effort into this interview.
• Some of the students may not think before they talk or have a relatively poor logic while talking which makes the conversation a bit hard to follow.
• Some of the students might feel not very comfortable to talk to a stranger (e.g. due to culture reason), thus they might just talk for the sake of talking and we cannot get useful data.
• We conducted the interview in seminar rooms where it mict ght create a environment that makes students think they are in a lecture and this might constrain them talking.

In contrast to the practice, the interviews for my projects were such a good experience. The interviewees here are independent directors. As I had sent them emails to arrange the time before the meeting, they were aware of the brief content of this interview. I conducted the interview in cafes where we sat down and had a coffee. During these interview, I did not need to ask a lot of questions as they could start talking by themselves and carried on for a long time. I could just pick up the points I needed and occasionally asked some follow-up and confirming questions. All interviews last about an hour and whole process were very smooth.

I have summarised some key points for these interviews:

• The interviews are arranged in advance which gives both the interviewer and interviewee time to prepare the interview.
• The directors generally talk coherently with a structure, and sometimes, give relative examples to illustrate their points. There is a large quantity of information contained in their responses.
• The directors have a lot of industry experience where they have developed good interpersonal skills. Thus, they might know how to talk in public and/or do interviews which they are comfortable with what they are talking about.
• Café can be good place for interview as it creates a causal atmosphere, which makes the interviewees more approachable. Also, having something to drink during the interview (especially long ones) can help the interviewees to get rid of dry throat from talking for too long.

In conclusion, there are many things might affect your design of interview strategy, for example, the characteristics of interviewee (talkative or quite?), the arrangement, the place of choice and etc. Hopefully, by sharing my experience, more people will get some insights into how to conduct a good interview. Finally, just go and get your hands dirty. Wish everyone have a good time interviewing!