School psych interviews
Last Monday we had interviews for the incoming school psychology cohort. Ever since my own interview two years ago I had been waiting for the day when I got to be the cool kid who knows what's going on at the interview. Finally, my day had come.
Of course, interview day isn't really about me. It's about the prospective students who are hoping to put their best foot forward. It's about our faculty members who are hoping to put together the best cohort they can. It's about our program, both what we can offer students and what the students can offer us. But for me, it was a day to reflect and a day to show the prospective students where they could be two years from now.
When people ask me why I chose W&M, I always laugh because my reasons were all a bit ridiculous. All the other schools I applied to were close to home, but because I missed the application deadline for one of my original schools, I looked for a school in Virginia that was near the beach. By the time I got my invitation to interview here, I had already interviewed at four other schools and been accepted to one. W&M was eight hours away from me, I was scheduled to work when the interview was happening, and I was expecting to be accepted by at least one more of the schools I had already interviewed at. I was completely prepared to send an email saying that unfortunately, I would not be able to attend the interview, when my grandparents said "we'll take you." Just like that, I went from not going to rearranging my schedule so that I could make it to this one final interview.
The morning of the interview, we left early and drove around Williamsburg a bit, and by the time we got to the School of Education and I saw the beautiful building we get to basically live in during our time as grad students, I realized that if I got into the program here, I would have to come to school here. Something about W&M and Williamsburg felt like home before I even knew what the faculty was like.
As it turned out, since then I've found that there are some really excellent reasons for coming to the school psych program here. Our faculty are amazing. The community in the SOE is great. And the school psych program itself is a strong program. We are well prepared to go into internship interviews, internship itself, and finally into our first jobs. We are competitive in the applicant pool for the jobs we apply for, and people are eager to work with us. It's a hard program, but that's only so that we'll come out on the other side ready to be incredible school psychologists.
The interviews went well, and I had a great time talking about the program I'm in and my life here at W&M. I answered questions and tried to put our prospective students at ease. And now I'm excited to see who becomes part of the school psych cohort of 2019!
