Just got back in the door from the Interac seminar/interview. I am tired lol I feel for my ride though he was out till 3am and woke again around 7:30 to take me and slept in the car while I was in my interview.
So I arrived and saw a sign saying Interac america was in boardroom 216 and headed for the elevator. I was being shadowed by a guy in the suit and once we both got out on the second floor we knew we were both going to the same place. Danny and I decided to head back downstairs because we were told to gather in the lobby. Plus it was looking a bit like a hotel room instead of a meeting room so we didn't want to knock lol.
Downstairs we sat down and shortly after that another guy in a suit carrying a white board walked in then another. The recruiter came down and joked seeing only 3 of us (one headed to the restroom) that she wouldn't be able to do the interview unless there were 6 of us. In the end that was how many of us there were. I was the only girl (outside of the recruiter). We went through the presentation which if you looked at the pdf they send you'll know all it says but the new info will come from the recruiter. for example she told us that if we were interested in leaving to be there June 19th there would be a bonus and that those who would leave in June would be looked at first. Also the Tokyo office will 'grade' your demo lesson.
When going over clothing being the only girl I felt a bit... reprimanded for what i wore lol She made extra comments of a shell under your blouse and a jacket ^^;;; i really hope that doesn't cost me the job but I still looked possessional anyways. half way through the presentation we took a break. First we completed our grammar test which ... i know it sounds strange but is harder and easier then you think. it was in 4 sections Sentences that had works underlined and you had to pick out which word was wrong or didn't need to be there. The next section was iding a sentence as passive or active voice. After that was spelling they had about 10 or so words and some were misspelled and if they were you needed to correct it. Like Tommorow -> Tomorrow.
Then there came the long run on sentence that is a paragraph that you have to put punctuations for. Think of it as this paragraph i'm writing with no capitalization or "." or ",".
It wasn't too bad except I know more about Active and Passive in Japanese than English and I'm one of the people that think spell check is from god! lol She did say we were all either average or above average on the grammar test.
so after the break we went back to the presentation and talked salary and things. I noticed this time that only 29% of the ALTs are female O_O that seems to be a representation of that in the interview. And that my perfect ideal placement of Nara might be in the "blue area".
So the presentation ended and we decided what order we would do our demo lessons and I got the second slot which also meant that I would be going second in the personal interviews too.
Overall. I have more confidence in my lesson demo even though my poster board tried to run away from me during it. The most surprising thing was that our demos were going to be in front of the other interviewees. Everywhere else i read they were private, just you the camera and the recruiter.
The guy first to go skipped the second task and went right to task 3 but when he was preparing for task 4 he saw the script sitting there and so did the reading of the script then. The taping was not stopped so when he was working on getting ready for the next task he was losing time.
I went with not too many problems. I think I'll break it down by task.
Task #1:
I used the most Japanese in my self intro and I could tell from the pronunciation of the others they were still early in their Japanese study. I felt bad because i really didn't want to show off... I just said some of the things they wanted in Japanese and kept the English simple.
My Japanese self intro I said:
My name is....
I was raised in California and graduated with a Japanese BA from Hawaii. I hope my 5 year experience working as an assistant teacher and my time studying Japanese will be of use to the students and teacher.
I though the BA from Hawaii and 5 years experience being of use was a little much in English...
hmmm one person did not use any Japanese if I remember correctly but we all ended up including something with hand motions.
Task #2:
Straight forward outside of the starter forgetting about it.
Task #3:
I and someone else did Simon Says I did Bunny says. There was a song for counting to 20. The best one which I will use in the future was counting in connection with animals. 1 duck, 2 cats, 3 rabbits. that kind of thing. it went up to... 4 or 5. Then there was... a tongue twisters of peter piper and sally selling seashells. and there was head shoulders knees and toes.
Task #4:
half of us did Option 1 with a shopping dialogue. One was almost like the example demo we were given. I had a fill in the blank with part of the dialogue and showed an example with a Book then asked the 'students' ideas of what they bought.
Two of them did Option 2 Directions. Both had great ideas. One used a little key chain size stuff bear as a character to give directions to. I did what i could to give a correction for the one who was doing their demo.
One did the third option which was irregular verb. Very ambitious choice!
So after the demos we were given our personality test and told when to be back after lunch. I was second to go so I had about an hour and a half (needing to be back by 2pm) before my interview so i got a hotdog near by and worked on my personality test. I got Idealist I believe lol guess i was a little too realistic to be guardian. The only problem with the test is that there are 70 questions to answer but it'll get done.
On my way up to the interview i saw the guys were back from lunch and walking by I believe Chris was his name took out his phone and showed me the time before i could ask what time it was. I had 5 minutes to get back up stairs. I paced a bit took a breath and knocked on the door.
The one on one I found to be more of a conversation with a focus on getting info on how you viewed the job. It's almost as if you were hired and they were placing you. You will most likely get send Pre-Interview Questions and that's basically what they ask. The recruiter and I traded stories. Only sad thing was that I learned that Nara might be hard to get into. I really didn't want to come off sounding like a tourist but since I didn't explain why Nara (the deer! lol) I did say I loved Japanese history and she said that was great to know because i could be placed somewhere there is a lot of history but might not be as famous.
My advice for the interview session and relax and be yourself. Say the truth and not what they want to hear. Thankfully all the recruiters I've talked to have been really friendly so it's easy to relax and share your love for Japan.
I kick myself now for not asking a question which I forgot again lol but I asked exactly what happens next. She told me she has until thursday to get her info and all my paperwork to Utah then every Tuesday packets get sent to Tokyo. Once Tokyo has your packet they have 7/10 days to look at it. so she said about 3 weeks but if I do the math and Tokyo gets my package next Tuesday I should hear between the 3rd and 6th of May. She said it might get delayed a bit because they are looking at those willing to leave in June first to get them started on the their visas. So maybe I'll hear May 10th. My late mother's birthday. As sweet and emotional as that might be I would like to hear the 3rd (or sooner! lol).
Ok that's it for the day I am going to see about dinner! ^-^
Edit: Funny how I forgot to add this in lol I was picking up my things to take to the car and ended falling when trying to stand up because of the skirt i had on. It was your standard straight skirt you might think of in terms of female suit. First time I owned on lol Going with the advice of the recruiter for humid japan and will wear pants in the future lol.
The recruiter made a comment about not embarrassing myself today and I reminded her of the fall with a laugh and she said no one saw and that when she looked over she just saw me on the ground lol we can pray that's true ^^
