Jason - as much as I respect your opinion and views, I am afraid that I have to disagree with you on this point.
A script doesn't mean it's a crafted speech, it's simply something to organize my thoughts together, like the use of index cards. Something i realized during my mock interview was that if the interviewer just sit still and listen to my "wall me through your resume" question, I get so nervous and self-conscious that I become such a lousy speaker (having a lot of "uh"'s in my speech), even though I am not in usual business settings and conversations. By reading that script several times before the interview, I made sure that when I'm telling a story and when I feel like the right vocab is not coming my way, I know what to say. I didn't memorize that script, nor did I glorify anything in my story, I was simply being "me" - the calm me, instead of the nervous, don't-know-what-to-say me.
However, J.J. turned out to be a completely different style that I expected and our interview was very conversational, so I didn't have to use that speech at all.
I am still glad that I prepared for that speech thought, because the worst thing I want coming out of an interview is regretting that I didn't tell the interviewer something that I would like to convey in the interview, or if I happened to get "stuck" or went blank in the middle of an interview. For us non-native speakers, sometimes conveying our own thoughts in English in a quickly responsive way is not always as natural as native speakers. My boss is an American that speaks fluent Mandarin, and each time he goes to pitch the clients, he always had me translate a "script" into Chinese for him to practice and memorize. That doesn't make him a worse business leader, in fact, he achieved great result with his prepared speech with clients and impressed the clients with his fluent Mandarin being a white American old man.
Thanks for your response. We certainly agree with one another. As you point out yourself, preparation and knowing what you want to say is not the same as memorisation. I too prepared points I wanted to express, and practiced expressing it in a certain way. You went past memorisation and moved to a conversation, which is a good thing. Unfortunately not everyone is able to do the same. Some get too nervous and can only talk about what they had prepared.
For instance, I heard one story of an applicant from Dubai who froze up when the adcom, when opening the conversation, said "I heard there are ski slopes in Dubai. How are they?' He froze for 30 seconds, then hesitantly replied: "I don't understand the question". The adcom member tried again: "The new indoor ski slopes?" He replied again, "Sorry, I don't understand." The adcom then thought, erm ok... nevermind... "tell me about your leadership". And suddenly the applicant became very 'fluent' again. The fact that the adcom was even telling me this story probably doesn't bode well about the applicant's chances. I'm just cautioning against someone else falling into this trap too.
This is an extreme example- it obviously differs from your own experience, which clearly went very well. It's also different from the example of your boss, perhaps, because your clients are not expecting to converse with your boss in Chinese. In contrast, an MBA interviewer is to some extent looking out for an international student's ability to converse, to be able to contribute in class where you don't 'memorise a script' going in, and to be able to truly get a lot out of the Wharton experience.
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发表于 2010-3-3 10:27:18
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