My biggest career faux-pas consisted of me scheduling an interview at 9 am the morning after a red-eye flight that had gotten into EWR at 6 am. I was running on three hours of sleep and an inconsistently large amount of coffee, which has always given me the jitters and made me nauseous. I was sweating like a pig and stuttering like a parrot. I had never been on a real-job interview before, let alone on three hours of sleep, and my sleep-deprived and anxious mental state made the whole experience a blur. When I seriously try and recount it now, this is all that I really remember- not what I learned about the job, or about how to interview.
The timing of the interview was only one aspect of the event that went wrong. Aside from my lack of sleep, I didn’t have a printed resumé like everyone else in the interview had. I was wearing a weird-looking “professional” shirt when everyone else was wearing something chic and “New York.” I probably was focusing too much on what “everyone else” was doing, but it was my first experience even dipping my toe in the professional world. And the professional world got a real impression of me. I guess in a way I was honest- I would be terribly sleep deprived and coffee-addled for a lot of days on the job (which I would later get!) but I wish I had the experience of putting my best foot forward for a job interview, and could actually remember my mistakes well enough to learn from them.
Aside from that one interview, I’ve realized throughout my experience that I have a lot of nervous ticks. These don’t just come out in interviews, but any time that I’m just starting a job and nervous about how I’ll do there. When I feel like I have a lot to lose, I get quiet and anxious, pulling at my hair or picking at my fingers and especially being clumsy. During my first week in the restaurant I used to work at, I broke a glass- not when I was serving customers, but when I was drinking water in the back with my coworkers. At another job, I spilled four separate glasses of water on the owner of the restaurant. That was my first and my last day there- it was a formal restaurant, and the extensive list of rules I had to abide by made me even more nervous than I already was. I’ve found that the best way to combat these nerves it to just try and remain reassured in my experience and myself. I have to really think about not saying “like” or “um,” sometimes, or to twiddle my hair or my hands, but I know if I focus enough, I can accomplish just that.
