This is going to be a long long long
post!!!!!!!!
So today was the day of my ALT JET Program
interview at the Melbourne consulate and honestly things couldn't have gone
better, no surprises Melbourne's weather lived up to
its notoriety with it being 35 degrees but also storming in the
afternoon with insanely heavy flash rain!
So I'll talk about what I did to prepare
for the interview a little later on, but I'll first recap what i did to get
into the right state of mind in the morning, I thought it would be a good
idea to spend some time relaxing before my interview rather
than cramming since iv been working at it for weeks and to be fair if
I didn't know what I wanted to say on the morning of the interview
revising wouldn't help!
- I woke up really early as
I couldn't sleep due to nerves
- Had a high fibre breakfast
- Played with my pug Fuji for a while.
- Swam 50 laps in my pool.
- Had a shave and shower.
- SUITED UP!
- Verbally went through all 30
or so questions I had thought up extended answers to in a mock interview
pretending my interview panel was this kitsune mask on my wall.
I was lucky enough that my brother offered
to take me to my interview, usually I wouldn't ask but it
was 35 degrees and the last thing i wanted to do was sit an hour on a bus/train/tram
in the heat on the way to the consulate. I arrived super early (like 2
hours) as I wanted to be 100% sure that even in the worst
case scenario I wouldn't be late however no such thing
occurred so I waited until around 45min before
to actually enter the consulate as not to appear too keen.
The waiting room was nothing like what I
was expecting based on things I had read in forum posts and blogs, no JET
aluminum to talk to, no cheesy JET program video. I guess there a
US/UK thing........
Basically just a desk in the consulates
library with a jug of water on the table, there were no bonuses for arriving
early unless the lady at the desk was noting my check in time.
They were doing 3 interviews at a time in
separate rooms with half an hour for each. Also I didn't notice
any body walking out of the interview shaking or anything, everyone had a smile
on their face which was very reassuring and it was very comforting to see
everyone had had similar experiences preparing for the interview.
There was one Japanese looking
girl sitting in the waiting room when I arrived, I tried my best to chat
to her, but she was very quiet and answered all my questions with short one
word answers.
As
the awkwardness grew progressively thicker my imagination
began to run wild as I got this sneaking suspicion that she was some
sort of spy from the consulate to see if we would make small talk when put in a
room with a stranger. Eventually I realized I was perhaps just on the
paranoid side of things XD
As her interview was half an hour before
mine she was soon off and replaced by the other 2 applicants who were to be
interviewed alongside me, luckily these guys were a lot more chatty and we got
along just fine discussing the painful ordeal that is 'JET Program Interview
Hell', even shouted to each other がんばれ as we headed in.
Keeping consistent with
everything iv read about the Australian interview process it seems like
we really do get it easy, par usual there was a former JET participant,
a consulate employee and a native Japanese speaker who was incredibly
friendly but whose job now escapes me.
There was no 3 meter void between myself
and the panel, I was simply seated on the other side of a regular desk
and they didn't play was good cop, bad cop with me either and
they all seemed to be genuinely interested in me and what I had to say.
I'm thinking I might just utilize a couple of these fantastic web-comics from this series called 'Life After the B.O.E.' in future posts,
which are all about life on the JET Program(me).
They are done by a former JET CIR named David Namisato.
If your interested check them all out here:
Honestly the whole interview was an
absolute blur but here's the questions that I remember:
- Tell us a little about yourself, why do
you want to do the JET Program?
- How will JET fit into
your career goals?
- What would you include if you were
to present Australian at a local cultural fair?
- Would you be happy to
sing karaoke in front of your co-workers at an enkai?
- Would you be happy to sing karaoke in front of your co-workers at an enkai?
(I said i love singing even though i am terrible at it, then i asked them if they would like me to sing, the consulate employee said 'sure please sing a song you would sing to primary school children', I had been practising 'heads and shoulders, knees and toes' for weeks ^_^ However I also came with backup plans, if they had asked me to sing a song that would be appropriate for highschool I had prepared to sing 'Hot n' Cold by Katy Perry as it would be good to teach opposites, and I had 'I Still Call Australia Home' memorized like a boss in case a cultural song was asked of me)
- What do you know about current social
issues in Japan?
- So I see you picked Kobe, Hyogo
Prefecture and Saitama Prefecture do you have some attachment to these places?
- What if you are put in an inaka
placement, how will you cope?
- Tell us some of your strengths? What is
your greatest weakness?
- What would you do if the JTE made an
obvious English error during a class?
- A couple questions in nihon-go about
myself.
- Do you have any questions for us?
At the end of the interview they asked me
to re-fill out my medical forms as apparently the second page of it had
mysteriously gone missing, I totally impressed them by saying well I can
actually do one better, I brought along a copy of my application so here it is
a copy of the original =P
Then they we had a chat about me being
allergic to oysters and how i will need a doctors certificate to
bring an eppipen into Japan, then i jokingly asked to please not be put in a
town where oysters are the regional speciality (which
is Hokkaido) as I might die of anaphylaxis!
Now I'll tell you a little about how I
prepared for the interview.......
As I mentioned in my previous
post ever since i got back from holidays over new years I have been
spending a couple hours a day revising pretty much every single conceivable
potential question I could think up and find on the internet.
I had so many amazing answers to questions
that I worked on and practiced over and over for hours, unfortunatly i didnt
get asked most of them as theres only so much time in that room but here are a
couple extra that you might want to prepare for
that I didn't get asked but others did:
- Why do you want to teach in Japan and
not Korea or China?
- What 3 Items would you bring to
represent Australia?
- What would you do if a child was
misbehaving in class?
- How would you deal
with inappropriate questions from a student?
- What do you know about the Japanese
school system?
- What things do you know about
Japan?
- What would you say if a student asked
you about whaling?
Now I am very fortunate in that I have a
job where quite often I find myself with very very little to do but sit around
and look pretty for much of the day, so I have been dedicating
this immense amount of downtime to studying up profusely,
after almost 2 months of this I ended up filling up 2 whole work books with
potential questions and answers.
Do you really need to work as hard as I
did?? Probably not...... a lot of people probably get in
who didn't but at the end of day if you really want to be a JET
participant isn't it worth the effort?
The absolute best resource you can utilize
is jumping on the JET Forums, now theres the official one http://www.jetprogramme.org/forums/ however I very
much preferred I Think Im Lost (ITIL) http://www.ithinkimlost.com/.
I have been using it daily since I started
my SoP last year and users are more than happy to help with every step of the
JET application process.
DON'T JUST LURK!! JOIN THE
COMMUNITY!!
Just a note though that forum has a 1337ist
vibe and theres a couple moderators that seem to take pleasure in ripping on
weeboo's.
Also if your reading this looking for
interview tips, although I have tried my
best don't discount google(ing) every conceivable mash up of
JET Interview kinda search terms you can think of 'eg. Melbourne JET Program
Interview 2012', you will be amazed at the amount of helpful blogs
(like this one ^_^) you will stumble upon.
IF YOU HAVE READ THIS FAR........ THE CAKE
IS A LIE!
and now its
finally time to get insanely drunk and forget all those interview
questions iv been cramming my brain full of for the past few months
wewwwww
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