How My Marketing Degree Made Me a Better Interviewer.

I have been at Aurora University for over a year now and I have already learned so many skills in the process of earning my Bachelor's Degree. Although I have learned many marketing skills while at Aurora University, I have also learned many interpersonal skills in the process. I developed these skills from some of the courses I completed and from my internship at Fox Valley Habitat for Humanity. I learned many tricks and techniques on how to talk to people and make them feel more comfortable from my Sales class. I also learned how to complete an in-depth interview from my consumer insight and marketing research courses. After completing these courses I was tasked to put my skills to the test at my current internship at Habitat for Humanity because I have to interview many different types of people and write an article based on my time with them. Through the multiple interviews I have conducted and the techniques I learned in my courses, I have developed my ability to successfully conduct an interview that gets meaningful and important insights out of them.

The key insights that I took away from my sales class with Professor Shawn Greene allowed me to learn how to refine my approach to talking to people. He taught me that it is important to learn a lot of information about a prospect, or the interviewee in this case, beforehand. This might not be possible for every person I interviewed, but if I could find anything valuable about the person I was going to interview I would use that information to make a connection with the person before the interview. This makes them not only feel more comfortable talking to me, but it will also make them more likely to share information they might not have shared if I knew nothing about them. Speaking of making a connection, I also learned that it is important to make some small talk with a person and get to know them before conducting business with or in this case interviewing them. I used this tactic with a couple of people that I interviewed at my internship and in one instance I managed to have a whole conversation with the person I interviewed a couple of weeks before the actual interview. This allowed them to be more open when I actually had to conduct the interview with them. Without these insights, I might not have gotten the same information I did when I interviewed them for the article.

Another experience that helped develop my interviewing skills was my consumer insight and marketing research classes with Professor Elizabeth Grabowski. For both courses she had us conduct in-depth interviews with close family members or friends as practice to improve our skills. This practice made me feel more comfortable when conducting actual interviews for my internship. She also taught us many techniques to use during our interviews to get more valuable information out of our participants. One technique that I now use extensively is laddering, which is having the respondent expand on their answers by asking similar follow-up questions. This technique helps get to a deeper motive that the participant might not have wanted to reveal or might not have even considered before expanding on their answer. Another technique she taught us was the deprivation technique, which asks the participant how they would feel if they could no longer experience something. This reveals how the participant would truly feel if they couldn't experience something or if they would even notice. Another tactic she taught us was the third-party role-playing technique, which is putting the respondent in a hypothetical situation to reveal their true feelings. This technique makes the respondent think harder and makes them think about the question differently. There have been many other techniques that I learned but these are the main techniques that have helped the most.

Learning these techniques would likely not be that beneficial if I wasn't actively using them in my interviews. My internship has allowed me to test these skills that I have learned by having me practice them on actual interviews. My internship requires me to interview people that are involved with the organization and write articles about them. Some people that I have interviewed for the organization have consisted of construction workers, ReStore employees, homeowners, and volunteers. If I had not taken these courses, my interviews would have not gone as smoothly, because I didn't have any experience with interviewing people. I am thankful that I have taken these courses and been able to apply them to my internship to benefit my quality of work. Although I was not expecting to learn about interviewing people with my marketing degree, I have, and it has expanded the amount of skill that I have accumulated in the process. These skills will help me have a competitive advantage over many people in my career path who haven't learned how to successfully conduct an interview. I have learned so much within the past year and I feel that it has helped develop my personal growth for when I actually begin my career.