The Interview

Had an interview for going on one year exchange program in Japan today.

First of all , let me say I didn't do well. I kept beating around the bush instead of getting straight to the points. The questions also took me by surprise.

The interview was way too short. They squeezed 21 interviewees into about 2 hours, so it means each one of us got only about 6 minutes. Seriously, can you judge people in 6 minutes?

63 students were scheduled to be interviewed in English while only 14 were in Japanese. I chose to have an interview in English, even though it'd be more competitive, because I felt I could express my thoughts in English better. There were 2 Thai judges, both were teachers at Faculty of Arts. I hadn't known them before, though.

There was ONE SINGLE question concerned about Japan which was about one difference between Japanese and Thai societies. The rest of the questions were heavily focused on...the King!?

Well, maybe I was the one who brought that up myself. The interviewer asked why I began my study plan with Thomas Jefferson's quote “A nation as a society forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society” and I answered honestly that I liked what he said and his quote could be linked through my study plan topic really well.

What a PLAIN answer! It should have had more meaning than that, shouldn't it? I should have picked Jefferson because he's my lifetime hero or I felt I had been enlightened by whatever he had done or *insert bullshit here* But the truth is it could be from Jefferson or Winston Churchill or Thatcher the milk snatcher or George Bush (hmm no that would be a stupid one) or anyone, as long as the quote fitted my study plan.

Then the interviewer went on and asked "Who is the political figure that you admire?"

"What the hell?" I thought. "They're all the same to me, just a bunch of bullshit."

So I said I didn't have one. I do have ONE person I admire, though. Can you guess who I came up with? I'm sure you can. The answer was SO figured. Any other students would probably have answered the same thing.

Oh yeah, who else but The King? So I said King Rama V with his abolition of slavery and compared it with American Civil war to praise his intellectuality. (Don't know where the heck that came from, either. For the record, I've never had anyone I admire in my entire life).

From then on, the conversation consisted of nothing but the king. The interviewer asked about my opinion on some ongoing criticism that the king should be abolished in Thailand. She also wanted me to explain why Thai people love and respect the king so much.

These two were ok. My answers weren't that great, but I tried to go around to it.

One last question, though, surprised me the most. The other interviewer, who had been quiet the whole time, suddenly asked me a question "What is your opinion about the statement - the king is an obstacle in modernized world?"

Oh god. This one was bad. My answer sucked. I'm so not going to repeat it here.

For some reasons, Her question made me immediately think about The Economist.

And that was pretty much it. End of the interview. Even now I'm still wondering what the hell all of that was about. Do they want a foreign exchange student in Japan or the king supporter in Japan?

Oh yeah, I remembered during the interview I once said "I love to read." And one of the interviewers was FROWNING and making faces. Made me wonder if it's illegal to be a nerd. She was frowning again when I said the war was cruel.

She could be Nazi, squirmed in excitement to see the bloodshed or whatever. You'll never know.

The other friend of mine, who is an English major, said the interview was pretty vanilla. She was asked some predictable questions like "Did you have fun when you were an exchange student in the US?" "What do you want to study in Japan?" and "How are you going to represent Thailand when you go to Japan?"

WHAT. THE. HELL. Are you kidding me? Where the hell is the criteria?

At least it was over. I shouldn't be thinking about it anymore. Looks like there's a possibility of me getting stuck in Thailand after all...