Your experiences

It is good to draw upon a wide range of different experiences in your applications and interviews, both academic and non-academic, as this can help to demonstrate that you are a well-rounded individual. To that end, start by listing out all the experiences you have accumulated to date. 

Doing so will ensure that you are less likely to forget about experiences that are worth discussing at a later stage, which can be especially useful if you are asked questions that catch you off guard. It also enhances the likelihood of you remembering each of your experiences whilst under pressure to answer a lot of questions in a short space of time. 

It’s important to remember that any of your experiences can be relevant to draw upon, no matter how trivial or irrelevant they seem. Your experiences don’t have to directly reflect the role you’re applying for; they may instead provide useful reference points to demonstrate positive attributes or that you’ve developed important transferable skills. 

Travelling, sport, music, volunteering, part-time work, debating, membership of societies, group work, tutoring, campus ambassador roles. All require certain skills and can demonstrate a broad range of attributes, including work ethic, commitment, motivation, interpersonal skills, professionalism, team-working and so on. 

I have worked in catering, on a building site, in a supermarket, as a tutor, as a bin collector and as a paperboy/girl, and discussing these experiences in my interviews actually helped me to find common ground with some of my interviewers (who had worked similar jobs when they were younger).

Any experience working in a service role – for example, working in a bar, in a retail store or on the checkouts of a supermarket - can also help to demonstrate that you’ve developed “client-facing” skills. “Client” is synonymous with “customer”, so any experience interacting positively with customers can therefore demonstrate that you’re able to act professionally when representing a business. 

Top tip: if you state that you are proficient in a different language, make sure you remember how to speak it when you attend an interview! I have heard stories of interviewers suddenly switching to a different language mid-interview to check whether the candidate really could speak the language(s) they claimed to know. 

Drawing out various aspects of your roles

To give a few additional examples of how an experience might – if thought about in sufficient detail – have encompassed a broad range of responsibilities and challenges: 

• If you are captain of your university’s netball team, your role might involve securing sponsorship, negotiating the price of the team’s kit, arranging training sessions, collaborating with other netball teams to arrange matches, organising transport for competitions, motivating teammates and more. 
• If you worked on a particularly challenging group project, this might have involved in-depth research, drafting a comprehensive report or pitch, working closely with other group members to pursue a common goal, working under pressure towards a strict deadline, thinking creatively about the structure and presentation of your work and more.
• If you have tutored younger students, this will likely have required you to keep them motivated and engaged, communicate complex concepts in an easily digestible manner, plan your lessons, adhere to strict deadlines etc.
• If you have been involved in debating or mooting, this will likely have involved public speaking in front of audiences, negotiating with others or trying to persuade them to accept your point of view, in-depth research and planning, long-term commitment and more.
• If you have been tasked with arranging a large event (such as a university ball), this will likely have involved conceptualising the event, branding and marketing the event, running the event, coordinating a team of assistants, managing the budget and more. All very similar skills to those required to run a business. 

If you haven’t taken the time to really think through your experiences in advance of an interview, you might forget many of these details whilst nervous or under pressure. 

It can also be helpful to provide statistics to support your statements, for example: the number of tickets you sold for a ball, the percentage increase in sponsorship revenue that you helped to generate, or the number of members you managed to sign up to your society.