Remote Meetings

After days of staying up until past midnight working on our consulting project, my team conducted our remote meeting by holding a conference call. We had already been using Google Docs throughout the semester for all of our group work, so it was very convenient to be able to access all of our materials while on the call. Conference calls are great. They can be easily accessed and can be arranged at a moments notice. I think that the most important aspect of any conference call is to have a designated leader of the call who is able to guide the conversation to hit the desired points. I use conference calls frequently for my work and there are many times where calls are completely unproductive because there is no clear direction and no designated leader to ensure that the call will be productive. Fortunately, our conference call for our project actually was productive.

Concise Writing

While I was working on my business article this week, I came to the conclusion that I may be the only person who has ever written on the topic of business skills in the health profession. Relevant sources were few and far between, and very few were useful. However, thanks to the vast amount of information and resources available to BYU students, I was finally able to scrape together enough information to signify a valiant research effort. While writing the article, I kept thinking about what Mark Twain said about writing a short letter. Being restricted to one page with citations included would have been the most awesome thing ever as a teenager, but now I found it to be a real challenge! I must have changed my font, headers, and graphic 31,495,789 times before I got it right. It was a good experience to force myself to be as concise as possible while writing about a topic of interest to me. Moral of the story, it really is harder to write a short message than a lengthy one.

Interview or Interrogation?

Questions. As an interviewer, your role is to ask the right questions in the right way to get the right results. The desired result is to obtain an accurate idea of what the individual would be like as an employee for your company. However, this is the tricky part. Because questions require a response, they tend to trigger a reactionary type of behavior (similar to defensiveness). As an interviewer, it is essential that you possess the ability to put the interviewee at ease, so that you can have the most genuine interaction with them as possible. This can mean the difference between an interaction coming across as a friendly interview or a hostile interrogation. How can you find the balance between professionalism and friendliness while conducting an interview? I'm not an expert, but I believe that as a general rule if you are real with a person, they will be real with you.  

Subject change. I think that as the interviewee, the most important thing is to be prepared for the job you are applying for. You need to have experiences that you can reference while being interviewed. In class this week, I think that probably 90% of the questions asked in the mock interviews were questions that would benefit from giving an example as an answer. It is very important to get experience in the types of skills that your future employers will be looking for so that you will be prepared to give spectacular answers to those types of questions.