“Are you sure of your answer? There isn’t anything else you want to add?” the interviewer asked me, clearly recognizing that I wasn’t sure of my answer.

“Um, yes, I’m sure,” I replied, attempting to sound confident as I hid my fear of being completely wrong.

To me, the scariest part of the entire career search is the interviewing process. On paper, you can spend as much time as you’d like composing your thoughts for your cover letter, fine-tuning your resume, and presenting the best version of yourself. However, in an interview, you have one chance to make a great first impression. What’s even worse is when you don’t know what to expect in an interview. The pressure of answering questions correctly and demonstrating interest are two areas that I’ve always found hard to juggle, as they both are important during interviews.

What I’ve learned about interviewing, at least in my own experiences, is that interviewers assess your overall performance. Does this mean that you can say something egregious and get by? Maybe, maybe not. But this does mean that minor mistakes in an interview won’t hurt you as badly as an interviewer having a negative overall impression of you. Interviewing. Is. Terrifying. Conveying your interests, personality, and experiences in a fixed time frame is simply extremely difficult to do. I guess I’ve found some comfort in knowing that if I thought a particular question was difficult, other people being interviewed may have felt the same way. Thus, my performance may have been evaluated in comparison to others.

And lastly, I’ve realized that evaluating your own performance after an interview can be really helpful for future interviews. I can’t remember how many times I’ve thought to myself, “I could have worded this better, used this example instead, remembered to bring up this topic…” I don’t think I’ve ever walked out of an interview confident that everything I said was exactly how I wanted to say it. In the same way, I often forget, or am unsure of, what I may have done well on. This probably is the reason why I leave interviews thinking that I could have done better. What I’ve started to do is keep a running list of things that I think I did well on so that in the future, I can highlight these details (I’ll admit it does help when an interviewer says, “That’s a great story!”). Analyzing my own strengths and weaknesses in an interview has really helped me make small improvements in how I present myself.

I am nowhere near where I want to be when it comes to interviewing, but I do think that giving your best effort and improving with each interview goes a long way.