Interviewing
An interview is a conversation with two purposes running at once: the employer is working out whether your skills and interests fit the role, and you are working out whether the role and the organization fit you. Both of those are happening in every question asked on either side, which is why the most useful preparation is not memorizing answers but getting clear on what you have done and what you are looking for.
Wesleyan students tend to arrive at interviews with more material than they realize. Seminar discussion is practice in thinking out loud under mild pressure. A thesis or research project is practice in explaining complicated work to someone who was not there for it. Campus jobs, student organizations, and the residential life roles that many students hold involve making decisions with incomplete information and living with the results, which is most of what behavioral questions are asking about. The work of preparing is largely the work of recognizing which of your experiences answer which questions.
This page covers the interview formats you are most likely to encounter, how to prepare for each, what happens in the room or on the call, and what to do afterward. Interview conventions vary by field more than most students expect, so when you are getting close to a real interview, schedule an appointment with the advisor who works in your area of interest.
On this page:
Practice, before it counts.
Big Interview is free for Wesleyan students and alumni. Record yourself answering real questions, watch it back, and work on the answers that need it. Practice sets are organized by industry, role, and question type. Register with your wesleyan.edu email
Types of Interviews
The format you encounter depends on the field, the size of the organization, and where you are in the hiring process. Most students will see several of these across a single search, sometimes several within one process.
Behavioral Interviews
Behavioral interviewing is the most common approach across industries, and it rests on the premise that what you did in a comparable situation is the best available evidence for what you will do in the next one. The questions open with some version of “tell me about a time when,” and the interviewer is listening for a specific episode rather than a general account of how you tend to operate.
The framework most people use to structure these answers is STAR: describe the Situation or Task, the Action you took, and the Result. In practice the Action is where most of your time should go, since that is the part only you can describe, and the Result is the part students most often leave out. An answer that ends without saying what happened leaves the interviewer to guess, and they will usually guess conservatively. Two minutes is a reasonable target for a full answer, and if they want more they will ask.
Your examples do not have to come from work that resembles the job. The interviewer is assessing transferable skills, so a question about persuading a skeptical audience can be answered with a moment from a seminar, a campus job, a student group, or a research presentation. What matters is that the example is real, that you can describe it in specific terms, and that it demonstrates the skill they asked about.
Case Interviews
Case interviews are the standard screen for management consulting and appear increasingly in strategy and operations roles elsewhere. You are given a business problem and asked to work through it live, which means breaking the problem into parts, stating your assumptions, doing arithmetic in your head, and narrating your reasoning as you go. The interviewer cares less about whether you reach the answer they had in mind than about whether your thinking is structured and whether you can be redirected without losing the thread.
Case interviewing is a skill built through repetition rather than reading, so if consulting is on your list, start well before recruiting opens. The GCC provides free access to Case Questions Interactive, an online platform built for this kind of structured practice. Our business career advisor runs mock cases with students and can explain how the format differs from one firm to the next. More resources and peer support is available through Consulting Pathways.
Technical Interviews
Technical interviews test whether you can do a specific kind of work rather than whether you can describe it. In software engineering this usually means writing code in a shared editor while explaining your approach. In finance you might be asked to walk through a discounted cash flow model or pitch a stock, and the areas within finance differ enough that investment banking, sales and trading, and asset management each have their own conventions. In data roles, expect questions about method and interpretation. In the sciences, you may be asked to defend a choice you made in your research or explain what you would do differently.
Because the content varies so much by field, general interview practice will only take you part of the way. Exponent covers technical interview preparation for software engineering, product management, data science, and related roles. For finance specifically, our business career advisor can point you toward the right preparation and run through technical questions with you.
Panel and Group Interviews
A panel interview puts you in front of two or more interviewers at once, which is common in education, government, healthcare, and the nonprofit sector. Direct your answer primarily to whoever asked the question while including the others with your eyes, and if names and roles are not offered at the start, it is entirely reasonable to ask.
A group interview places you alongside other candidates. The interviewer is watching how you work with people, which means listening to what others say and building on it counts for more than saying the most. These show up in client-facing roles and in some nonprofit and consulting settings.
Informational Interviews
An informational interview inverts the usual arrangement: you are the one asking, and nobody is evaluating you for a job. These conversations are covered fully on the Networking page, including how to write the first message and what to ask. They are worth mentioning here because they are among the better forms of interview preparation available to you. Ten conversations with people in a field give you a working vocabulary and a sense of what the work actually involves, both of which show up in your answers later.
Interview Settings
Beyond the type of questions, interviews vary in setting, and each setting carries practical details worth sorting out before the day arrives.
In Person
For interviews held on campus through our recruiting program, arrive at Boger Hall at least ten minutes ahead and check in at the front desk. If the interview is at an employer’s office, give yourself considerably more margin than you think you need, particularly if you are relying on transit or driving somewhere unfamiliar. Arriving an hour early and waiting in the lobby is its own kind of awkward, so if you find yourself with extra time, spend it somewhere else nearby.
Once you are in the building, assume the evaluation has started. The person at the front desk is often asked what they thought of you, and in smaller organizations they may have real influence. They are also, incidentally, the best source of unguarded information about what it is like to work there.
Bring a few copies of your resume. It is uncommon to be asked, but having one on hand costs nothing. Bring something to write with and on, both for the questions you prepared and in case you are handed a problem to work through.
Video
Video is standard for first rounds and increasingly for final rounds as well. Choose somewhere quiet with a plain background and reliable internet, and if your living situation makes that difficult, email careercenter@wesleyan.edu to reserve a room at the GCC when one is available.
Look at the camera rather than at the face on your screen, which feels unnatural and reads as eye contact on the other end. Headphones with a built-in microphone usually produce better audio than a laptop microphone and are entirely normal now. Test the platform the day before rather than five minutes ahead, since the software you are asked to use is often not the one you already have installed.
Connections drop. When it happens, reconnect, apologize in one sentence, and pick up where you left off, because the interviewer has watched this happen many times and is not holding it against you.
Phone
Phone screens are often the first conversation, frequently with a recruiter rather than the hiring manager, and they are usually shorter and more logistical than what follows. Have your resume and the job description in front of you along with a few notes, though not so many that you start reading, since reading is audible and it flattens everything you say.
Without visual cues it is easy to talk over each other. Leaving a beat after the interviewer finishes, and occasionally asking whether you have answered what they were getting at, keeps the conversation from tangling. If a recruiter calls without warning and you are walking to class, it is completely acceptable to say you are in the middle of something and ask for a time later that day.
Recorded Video
One-way video interviews ask you to record answers to a set of questions with no interviewer present, and platforms like HireVue have made them common as a first-round screen, particularly at larger organizations. You typically get a short window to read each question and a fixed amount of time to answer, often without the option to re-record.
The difficulty is not the questions, which are usually standard, but the absence of anyone to react to. Most people find their first recorded answer stiff, so the fix is practicing the format rather than the content. Have a friend record you on a phone answering three or four common questions with a timer running, and watch it back once. That is generally enough to get past the strangeness.
Need a quiet space? If you need a private room for a phone or video interview, email careercenter@wesleyan.edu to reserve one at the GCC (as available).
How to Prepare
Learn the Organization
Read past the About page. Recent news coverage, an annual report, a strategic plan, the blog they keep for clients, and what people say about them on industry sites will each tell you something the marketing copy will not. For a nonprofit, understand which programs they actually run and how they are funded. For a startup, know what stage they are at and what problem they think they are solving. For an agency or a public office, know the mandate and any recent shift in policy or leadership.
None of this is so you can recite it back. It is so that when you say you are interested, the sentence has something in it. “I noticed the practice has moved toward climate work in the last two years, and I wanted to ask how that has changed the kind of cases you take” tells an interviewer considerably more than an expression of general enthusiasm.
Learn the Role
Read the job description closely and pick out the two or three capabilities the employer keeps returning to, since those are what you will be asked to demonstrate. If the posting emphasizes juggling multiple projects, have an example ready before you walk in. If it emphasizes writing for non-specialist audiences, know which piece of your work you would point to.
If you know who is interviewing you, spend ten minutes on their background. Not to compliment them on it, which lands poorly, but because knowing whether they came up through the technical side or the client side tells you something about what they are likely to probe.
Know Your Own Material
You should be able to move through your resume without looking at it, and for each entry you should know what you did, what changed because you did it, and what you took away. “Tell me about yourself” is not a request for a biography. It is asking for roughly ninety seconds that connect where you have been to why you are sitting here, and the good version of that answer is built rather than improvised.
Most Wesleyan paths do not run in a straight line, and the interview is where you supply the logic connecting the pieces. An English major applying to a research role who took courses at the Quantitative Analysis Center and spent two summers coding interview transcripts for a faculty project has a more interesting answer to “why this work” than someone who followed a prescribed track, provided they connect the dots out loud rather than assuming the resume does it for them. The employer is not going to construct that narrative on your behalf.
How to Practice
Reading about interviewing will only carry you so far, because the gap between knowing what a good answer contains and producing one while a stranger looks at you is closed through repetition.
Mock interviews with an advisor. Book an interview preparation appointment under your area of interest, since the conventions differ by field and the advisors know them. A mock interview gives you real questions, real-time feedback, and the experience of having done it once before it counts. You can ask for a full mock or for focused work on a single piece, whether that is the opening ninety seconds, a case, or the one question that keeps coming out wrong. Alumni may also volunteer to run mock interviews in their industries.
Big Interview. Big Interview is an online training platform, free for Wesleyan students and alumni, that pairs video lessons on interview fundamentals with a practice tool that records you answering questions so you can watch yourself back. You can select practice sets by industry, role, or question type, and the Answer Builder walks you through structuring behavioral responses. It is most useful in the two or three weeks before an interview, when what you need is volume rather than a single rehearsal. Register with your wesleyan.edu address at wesleyan.biginterview.com.
On your own or with a friend. Pick five questions, set a timer for two minutes each, and answer them out loud. Recording yourself on your phone and watching it back once will surface things you cannot catch from the inside: where you hedge, how often you say “like,” the point at which your energy drops, and whether the answer you gave was actually the answer to the question you were asked.
During the Conversation
The opening minutes matter more than their content suggests, since interviewers form early impressions that tint how they hear everything afterward. Greet the person by name, offer a handshake if you are in the room together, and treat the small talk as part of the interview rather than as a delay before it.
When the questions start, listen to the whole question before you begin composing an answer, which is harder than it sounds when you are nervous and have prepared material you are eager to use. If you need a moment, take it out loud: saying you want to think of the best example is better received than a rambling answer that circles for thirty seconds looking for its point.
Specificity is the thing that separates answers people remember from answers they do not. Describing yourself as detail-oriented is a claim about yourself, whereas describing the layout error you caught in the Argus proofs at eleven at night before an election issue went to press is evidence, and the interviewer can do something with evidence. Wherever you can, land the answer on what resulted.
When you do not know something, say so and then say what you would do about it, which is a more useful signal than a manufactured answer that both of you can hear is manufactured. “I have not run into that specific situation, but here is how I would think about it” is a perfectly strong response.
The Questions You Ask
You will be asked whether you have questions, and having none reads as indifference. Prepare five or six, since a good conversation will answer two or three of them before you get to ask.
The questions that work are the ones you could not have answered from the website. A few directions worth considering:
About the work itself. What a typical week looks like, what the person in this role would be expected to have accomplished after six months, which part of the job people find hardest, and what the last person in this position went on to do.
About the team and the place. How they would describe the group you would be joining, what they wish they had known before they started, how people at your level get feedback and develop, and what the organization is currently arguing about internally.
About what happens next. What the rest of the process looks like and whether there is anything in your background they would like you to clarify, which occasionally gives you a chance to address a concern you would not otherwise have known about.
Hold questions about salary, benefits, and time off until you have an offer in hand. At that point they become entirely appropriate, and the Offer Negotiation page covers how to approach them.
Closing
Try to notice when the conversation is winding down rather than extending it past its natural end. Before you leave, make sure you understand what happens next: whether they need anything further from you, when you can expect to hear something, and whether the next move is theirs or yours.
What to Wear
What you wear should let the conversation be about you rather than about your clothes, which mostly means choosing something clean, well-fitted, and comfortable enough that you are not adjusting it while you talk. Err toward the conservative end of whatever the field expects, keep scent to a minimum, and look at your shoes before you leave.
Expectations vary considerably by industry. Finance, consulting, and law generally expect business formal, which means a well-fitted suit in a neutral color. Technology, startups, nonprofits, education, and most creative fields tend toward business casual. When you are unsure, dressing one level above the daily office norm is a safe default, and asking is entirely normal: recruiters field the question constantly and would rather answer it than have you guess wrong.
None of this needs to follow gendered conventions. A suit, trousers with a blazer, a button-down with dress pants, a structured dress, a skirt with a tailored top, or any other combination that reads as deliberate and polished will serve you. What the employer registers is whether you look like you took the meeting seriously, and there are many ways to communicate that.
If buying interview clothing is not something your budget accommodates, apply for a Career Development Grant, which covers interview attire along with other career-related expenses. Students use CDG for this regularly.
After the Interview
Write within a day. A short, specific email to each person you met is standard, and specificity is what makes it worth sending. Reference something from your actual conversation, reinforce a point you made well, or add the thing you thought of on the walk home. Three or four sentences is plenty.
Dear Dr. Alvarez,
Thank you for talking with me yesterday about the research coordinator position. I have been thinking since about what you said regarding the retention problem in the longitudinal cohort, which is a version of the issue I ran into on a much smaller scale coding interviews for Professor Hilton’s developmental lab last year. I came away more interested in the role than when I walked in.
Please let me know if there is anything else that would be useful from my end. I look forward to hearing about next steps.
Best regards,
Jordan Ochoa ’27
If you met several people, write to each of them separately and vary the content, since colleagues do sometimes compare notes.
Write down what happened. Spend ten minutes afterward noting which questions caught you off guard, which answers landed, and what you would do differently. If there is a second round, these notes become your preparation for it. Even if there is not, the pattern across several interviews will tell you what to work on.
Follow up on their timeline, not yours. If they told you two weeks, wait the two weeks. A short note to your main contact after that window has passed is reasonable and does not read as pushy. If another offer arrives while you are still in process, tell them, since it is honest and it occasionally accelerates a decision that was going to be favorable anyway.
Withdraw properly if you lose interest. A brief, warm email saying you are stepping back is all it takes. Professional communities in most fields are smaller than they look from the outside, and the person who interviewed you may turn up again in ten years on the other side of a hiring decision.
If Something Goes Wrong
Interviews go sideways with some regularity, and the recovery is more informative to the interviewer than the stumble.
If you lose your place mid-answer, stop and restart the sentence rather than pushing through and hoping it resolves. If you are three sentences into an example and realize it does not answer the question, say so and switch, which demonstrates that you were listening. If you are asked something you did not anticipate, think out loud, since working through an unfamiliar problem in real time is frequently the thing being tested.
If you go entirely blank, a short pause and a request for a moment is the professional move, and it is far more common than students imagine. Interviewers have all been on your side of the table.
One thing worth knowing: a bad interview is not usually as bad as it feels while it is happening. The internal experience of an answer that meandered is much more vivid to you than the external one, and students routinely report being surprised by an offer that followed an interview they were certain they had lost.
Questions You Should Not Be Asked
Federal, state, and local law prohibits employers from basing hiring decisions on age, race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital or family status, religion, disability, and other protected characteristics. Most employers know this and train for it. When an unlawful question does surface, it is more often the product of an untrained interviewer making conversation than of deliberate discrimination, though the effect on you is the same either way.
You are not obligated to answer questions about your age or birth date, your race or ethnicity, your national origin or whether English is your first language, your gender or gender identity or sexual orientation, whether you are married or have children or intend to, your religious practice or observance, whether you have a disability or have received workers’ compensation, or your family background and your parents’ occupations.
How you respond is genuinely up to you, and there is no single correct answer. You can decline and redirect, saying you would rather keep the conversation on your qualifications for the role. You can address the concern that seems to be underneath the question without answering the question itself, so that “do you have kids?” is met with confirmation that you are available for the schedule the position requires. Or you can answer it, if you are comfortable and you would rather move on. The judgment here is yours to make in the moment, and the problem lies with the question rather than with whichever way you handle it.
If something in an interview leaves you uneasy, bring it to an advisor. We can help you think through what happened, what it might mean about the organization, and what you want to do next.
Get Help With Any of This
An advisor can run a full mock interview with you, work through a single question that keeps going wrong, or talk through what to expect from a specific employer or industry. Book under your area of interest, since interview conventions differ by field and advisors know their own. Appointments fill during recruiting season, so give yourself two or three weeks where you can.
