Reaching Out to Professionals

This week in ISM gave me my first taste of the "Independent" aspect of the program. We started the week off by conducting mock interviews with one another, like we had done before, but this time we used our resumes. As I was being interviewed by a classmate, she questioned my choices of coursework, asked why I had or hadn't joined certain extracurricular activities, and tried her best to catch me off-guard and make me even more nervous. It was difficult to answer her questions initially, but as we kept practicing with other people, I was better able to explain my decisions and help the interviewer understand my reasoning for my topic of study, biomedical engineering, and my extracurriculars and academic coursework. I stopped over-thinking and started looking for patterns in the questions instead, which helped me have a general idea of what to say and greatly reduced my use of filler words. Another major aspect of this week was that I finally started contacting the professionals I had found in DFW to conduct research interviews with them. I sent out emails to two biomedical engineering professors, and it was so scary to hit the "send" button! I kept re-reading the email drafts, searching for typos or grammar errors, but eventually I felt confident enough to send them out. I'm really anxious and excited to hear back from them and hopefully schedule my first interviews, and I'm planning on contacting a few more over the course of next week. This upcoming week, I want to complete my second Research Assessment and start putting my ISM portfolio together with all that I have accomplished so far.