LIM College

by Edel Singh

Throughout our time here at LIM we experience a lot of life-changing scenarios. One of these type of situations can be interviews, and oh, boy, do we go through a lot of those.

Some experiences are great, while others can be pretty awful. Here’s an example of a "bad"  interview.

Knowing that time is of the essence in NYC, we don’t like to be kept waiting. For this particular interview I had to wait for almost 20 minutes. This was at a retail location, and it’s easy to understand that when dealing with customers, things can take longer than expected.

I was finally greeted by the manager and we went up to the top floor of the store and sat down on a couch. The conversation was flowing smoothly, which made me feel at ease and excited about the position. I was asked to do a styling challenge, and while I was running around the store, the manager was looking through my career portfolio.

When I came back upstairs after completing the challenge, the manager had tears running down his face and on my portfolio. In severe confusion, I slowly and quietly walked over to the couch. He grabbed me by the shoulders, and while standing uncomfortably close to my face, he said, “Your autobiography is so beautiful. You’ve been through so much!” I took a step back, while my face had defaulted to “confused.” I looked through my autobiography and had a hard time understanding what he was crying about.

I wanted his crying to stop so I offered to show him what outfits I had pulled for the styling challenge. The manager was impressed, and once again started tearing up while looking at me.

A few days later, I was offered the position. At first I hesitated but ended up expressing my willingess to accept the position. After accepting the offer, there was nothing but radio silence. I didn’t hear anything from the company for two weeks, and after having called them quite a few times, I still couldn't get a hold of the manager, but then I found out that the company was closing the store.

Although this experience forced me to change my plans a bit, I ended up getting a pretty priceless story. You can’t make stuff like this up.