Monday, October 15, 2012

Challenges and benefits of interviewing an international student (or an US student)


Interviewing a student that came from a different country could be a very challenging task, but with it comes many wonderful benefits. The international student and the interviewer may face communication issues throughout the interviewing process and it could be quite the struggle to feed questions in English to a person who grew up not speaking the language, but if the interview turns out to be successful, not only would the two people who were involved with the interview have a better understanding of that particular country, but everyone else who reads the transcribed interview. Learning about a different country and the culture and history it came with can be a very rewarding thing.

Another big problem that may have to be overcome on the interviewer's part is coming up with questions that would not be offensive in any way to the person they are interviewing. While you are giving an interview, you want the person to tell you everything they know about their country and the experiences they have had there and extract as much information from them as possible. If you were to accidently offend them by asking a misleading question, the interviewee may close themself up to you for the rest of the interview and that would result in receiving minimum information from them. The interviewee could start answering questions with shorter answers and not give you the full detail and their own personal opinion because they feel uncomfortable. By carefully picking out questions and practicing the way you should feed the question could avoid this whole misunderstanding and lead you to having a better interview.

By having a successful interview, you would have extracted precious information that could be used to have a better understanding of that country and its people. Expanding your knowledge about the world outside of your own country is something that could potentially bring people together.

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