Preparation!

Well, I'm at Panera, in a nice comfy chair.  There is a man sitting next to me (I was here first) who is in his 70s, reading the paper, but when I came back up to my chair I caught his eye so I smiled. But now he keeps staring at me. 

Since I ate lunch here, I decided to just keep working here since I didn't want to waste time driving over to Starbucks (who I think has much better coffee than here).  Apparently it was quite a feat for me to just get in here since I had to carry my heavy backpack. Normally, that's fine, but Monday I hurt my back working out (lame) and have had various degrees of muscle spasms for 3 days, so despite medicine, a massage, and heat pack, I can't get it to go away. So my back wasn't happy to have to carry that backpack.

Today, my goal is to finish going over answers to potential interview questions. Yes, my interview is tomorrow! At 10:30am, I'm a bit nervous, but mostly excited. She seemed really nice and comfortable to talk to during our first 2 minute long conversation, so that's good.  I hear that the recruiters really want to be able to nominate you, so really unless you fall flat on your face and then some, you should be fine.  

All the questions I have easy answers for are the ones specific to the Peace Corps (ie. about culture, comfort, food, religious preferences, family) and the ones I have no clue about are the standard interview questions I've already encountered.

• Describe a situation where you had to exhibit or use leadership skills.
• Discuss a situation in which you had to make a difficult decision and how people/you felt about it.
• How have you trained or lead people?
• Tell about a time you had to transfer your knowledge/skills to someone different from yourself. What did you learn about your interpersonal skills and the other person?
• Tell about a time when you worked in an unstructured or ambiguous situation. How did you approach the task at hand? What'd you learn about your strengths from that experience?
• What frustrates you and how do you deal with it?

Well, those are big questions! And I hear they want very detailed answers, very specific answers.  And those are the questions I just can't seem to overcome.