The origins of Captain Surly Pants (Part 4)

Winter vacation was the usual month of pure boredom. I would see some friends every once in awhile but most days were stuck in my house just flipping channels and watching TV. It was at about this time that I developed an unhealthy obsession with getting as much information about JET as possible.

Most of my time was spent looking up statistics and reading about the interview process and whatnot. I had a strong feeling that I wouldn't get an interview, but then again I've always been pretty pessimistic. The statistics made me feel even worse about my chances: something like only 25% of the people make it all the way through. Thinking about that number put me through a lot of pointless stress to go along with the already painful wait for the interview. At the time I didn't know that about 700 people are rejected just because they forgot to sign the application or some other similar reasons.

Winter break mercifully came to an end and I started up my last semester of college. My schedule was very light in spite of taking 12 credits. I only had to do any kind of work a couple days a week. This turned out to be a bad thing since it gave me that much more time to freak myself out over JET. The combination of lack of school work + lack of real work + boredom mixed with JET obsession lead to heavy drinking. I think I seriously started drinking 3 or 4 nights out of the week just to help the time pass by. I'm pretty sure that's one of the signs of alcoholism, but oh well. This also lead to me growing an ugly beer gut and being broke by the end of the semester...

Sometime in early February I got an email saying that I had made it past the application process and that I had been given an interview. Thank Jeebus (or Moses if you prefer)! My interview would not be until the end of the month, which marked the beginning of pain JET related waiting period #2 (of 4).

Relief quickly turned into angst again as I realized that now I would have to prepare for the friggin' interview. This lead to me reading up even more about the program, especially different people's interview experiences and list of commonly asked interview questions. All this really did was to drive myself crazy since the vast majority of questions were not even asked. I also think the ones I was prepared for may have sounded too rehearsed, but I guess everything wound up all right (I hope I didn't ruin the ending for all of you!).

My interview was at 11:00 on a Thursday in late February in a skyscraper in downtown Denver. I put on my only suit including my purple tie! I showed up about 45 minutes early and waited with some other interviewees on the 14th floor. They had three interview rooms set up in small, welcoming conference rooms on the same floor. Unfortunately for me, my interview would be in none of these rooms. When they called me for my interview they told me that I would have to make my way up to the 29th floor. This was such a long trek that I actually had to switch elevators at some point. I made my way to outside the interview rooms and had a seat in a small chair that faced the door which would decide my JET fate.

I became a nervous wreck for the 20 more minutes I had to wait outside that door. Eventually the door opened and the guy that was interviewed before me came out. He said that the interviewers were all friendly but at the same time seemed to be shaken up a little bit. A couple minutes later an extremely tall man ( he had to have been at least 6'8") came out and called me into the room.

In contrast to the small, comfortable interview rooms on the 14th floor, my interview room was set up more like an inquisition. The room was enormous and made to seem even larger by the fact that it was empty with the exception of a chair in the center of the room and a long table about 10 feet or so away. The room also had windows instead of walls on 3 sides which greatly added to the intimidating effect.

I had three interviewers: The tall guy who was a former JET, a female Japanese professor from a college in Colorado Springs and a Japanese guy who worked for the consulate (who I learned about a month later was the actual consulate general himself). The JET and the professor were very friendly and easy to talk to during the interview. The Japanese guy was mute and said two things the whole time. My interview started out well, but as it went on my nerves kept getting worse and the interview turned into what I perceived to be a disaster. Some highlights include:
-Me saying I didn't have any specific career goals
-Me repeating that I didn't have any career goals when asked again
-Saying that I wouldn't spend every afternoon after work volunteering to tutor two older women
-Not being answer the question "What 5 objects would you bring to Japan to teach children about America" at all
-An embarrassing demo lesson about the parts of the body that I still have nightmares about...

I walked out of the interview room fairly sure that I had just blown it. I had figured out that they took about 62% of the interviewees, and I was pretty sure that 40% of the people couldn't have done worse than I did. I guess JET just has a strange sense of what they consider to be a quality applicant....