I was attending JPA interview two months ago at Ipoh....In this post, I would like to share my interview experience...
My interview was held at 4.45pm but I departed two hours earlier so that to avoid any problems that may be arising due to the road condition...so, I managed to register myself an hour earlier....while I was waiting, the officers there asked me to join another group of students which was 45 minutes earlier than my original group...I agreed and to my surprise, I found that out of the 4 students there, 2 of them were my friends at national service....and 1 of them was my school principal's daughter...wao, such a coincidence! I never expected to meet them in such condition! Unlike other groups, we had a great time asking each other recent activities..we managed to relax ourselves by not mentioning about the interview later...haha
Finally, we were asked to enter the room...we walked cautiously into the room and there were three interviewers...all of them were male...After greeting them and gaining permission from them, we sat down according to our number...I was the fifth one and thus I sat on the last chair...
The interview started....as what we had expected, we were asked to introduce ourself one by one in bahasa Melayu...since the first one is a malay, she can speak bahasa Melayu fluently and the officer quite impressed with her...the rest of us were chinese but we managed to speak well too....I had made my draft at home but when it was my turn to introduce myself, I used to forget all!!! maybe I was too nervous...I continued by mentioning the family and education background..but what I have talked the most was about my experience of being a librarian in school....I talked about my happy and funny things of being a library such as how we all librarians participated in transforming the school library from a state of unpopular among students to a state of becoming congested place during the recess time...To my surprise, the interviewers showed high degree of interest to my experience...cheer!! maybe I should be grateful for forgetting my draft which I had prepared before...haha
When we finished introducing ourselves, the interviewer continued by requesting us to speak english in the rest part of interview...omg..this was the part that I worried the most, as my english is actually quite bad....T.T
The first question was " what are the criteria within you that can succeed you when you are studying abroad"..cheer!! I shouted within my heart! I had prepared for this question....I thought we had to answer according to our number and thus I waited others to talked first... when the interviewers saw none of us took the initiatives to start talking, one of them asked me to start first!
Oh! I really had a butterfly in my stomach and my hands was trembling all the way I talked...> < Despite all of this, I tried my best to show them my confidence by looking at their eyes or using some hand action while talking...when I finished bla bla bla, I thought it was over and it's other turn to talk....but the interviewers seemed not going to shift their attention to other....they kept on asking me " why do I choose pharmacy this course but not medication?" Oh! I would like to say that I was really so lucky! Again, I had prepared for this question! hahaha!!! I talked about the differences between doctor and pharmacy and from this area, I defended myself for choosing pharmacy...and before I finished, an idea flashed over my mind..."and the last reason is I am afraid of injection"...once I finished, all of them just laughed...I felt quite happy for creating a relaxing atmosphere...haha...XD
When all of us finished answering the first question, the interviewers shot us with another question.." how do you relieve your tension when you are stressful?" oh! oh! oh! I must have been praying a lot! All of the questions that I had prepared came out!! thanks God!!! haha...but this time the interviewer started from the first student and I was the last one to talk....and this made things harder to me as most of my point were mentioned by others....Finally I tried to debate from other's points..just like the second student said that she will call her mum during the free time...and I tried to say that calling family was a good idea, but for me, I think that this can be inconvenient as the time zone is different in different country...and most importantly, the phone bill can be quite expensive too..XD...so my suggestion is also to contact my family, but I will use other methods such as using email (to avoid disturbing family if the time zone is different) and using skype ( to save cost)....XD...please forgive me, I really could not think of other points...ha
When I finished, the interviewers officially declared that our interview over....wao, I saw my watch and to my surprise, we had been in the room for 45 minutes! actually the whole process was not as serious as what I had imagined before, instead, the whole interview was conducting under a relaxing atmosphere...the interviewer even tried to joke....haha...
