Into the Interview

I was incredibly blessed to be given the opportunity to continue to the next phase of the IISMA selection (which was announced on the 2nd of March if I'm not mistaken): the supposedly dreaded 30 minutes interview. But looking back at it, it was honestly kind of anti-climactic.

The Preparation

There were two main ways for one to prepare for an IISMA interview (or any interview in general really):

1. List down the most commonly asked questions (you can find this for IISMA interview with just a little bit of digging) and pre-craft the answer to those questions before the interview. During the interview, you can just draw your answer (mostly) from memory with appropriate adjustments. This will reduce the time-to-answer during the interview and better ensure the quality of the answer that you will give. Whether or not time-to-answer is a metric they seek isn't clear, but improving the quality of your answer is surely favorable.

2. Mock interviews. Practice makes perfect, and the same is true for doing interviews. You can use the questions that you have listed down previously to do mock interviews.

I was assigned an interview date of Wednesday, the 6th of March, and so I didn't have that much time to prepare for both. That said, I was kind of being pessimistic by only preparing for an interview once the next phase has been announced. If you are 1) confident that you'll get an interview or 2) do not mind wasting the time and effort for interview preparation should you not be accepted into the next phase, then you could 100% do the preparation long before the announcement.

Both of the aforementioned method to prepare for your interview are very valuable for the success of your interview, but mock interview is especially important. Other than for the obvious reason that it helps your ability to form a sentence on the fly and that it helps the pronunciation of said sentence, you can feel out your blind spot from the feedbacks given from the mock interviewer, especially if it's a substantive feedback. This should be a given, but it's preferable to have a mock interview done by a previous awardee since they (at least from my experience) tend to give much more substantive feedbacks. This is likely because they've been through the process and have also heard about plenty of interviews from other applicants.

The Interview

My interview took place at the same time as one of my classes (third year students in ITB's informatics engineering have their classes from the morning to early afternoon), meaning that I had to be absent for said class. That day, I woke up early in the morning to do a final mock interview with a fellow applicant. It is then followed with me practicing my answers. The most notable thing that I did during the interview is wearing a batik with a blazer as an outer, as well as a tie on top of it (I have a formal suit on hand that I usually wear to MUNs). I did that because I thought it was a quirky but neat way to stand out.

And so the interview began. It has to be noted that I pre-crafted my answers based on myself, not me playing a role as someone that I am not. That is exactly what I did as well during the interview. I didn't play a persona, or claimed things about myself that were untrue, I was answering the question as me. The following are some of the most notable things that I mentioned:

• The operating systems course in my major was one of the hardest due to the need for assembly programming (in which the interviewer not-so-subtly dissed me for having a skill issue in coding in assembly, which was hilarious).

• The condition of the cooking station at one side of my dorm.

• Several days prior, rain had suddenly started in ITB but I was prepared by always having my raincoat in my backpack, unlike some of my friends who were trapped in the rain for a while, unable to go home.

Then the interview suddenly concluded. 30 minutes flew by just like that. That swiftness of the interview is what made me feel pretty anti-climactic about the interview shortly after it was done. Overall I would have rated my interview performance as 8/10 because I definitely felt that I did great overall, but there were some specific questions that I could've given a better answer to. For example, at the tail end of the interview, I could've outlined a more elaborative and unique way in which I would contribute to IISMA in the future. But, since it was near the end of the interview, I was quite limited by the time given for me to answer. Thus, I only had enough time to breeze through my points.

More Documents

There's really not much to prepare for this phase in terms of documents, other than an SKBN (Surat Keterangan Bebas Narkoba) for yourself. It was pretty easy to get that document though. You should check whether the local health department offer the service and at what time of day. Then, you'll just have to come on time (should be obvious but I learned this the hard way) and follow their procedure. Alternatively, if your local health department does not offer said service or you are unable to do the procedure within their operating time, you could try contacting hospitals in your area who may provide said service. This was how I obtained my SKBN.