* Search the subreddit (and wider internet) for the many, many advice posts.
* Be yourself, be honest, be presentable
* don’t memorize a bunch of pre written answers, you’ll sound bad and they’ll know
* re-read your SOP so you know what you said.
Go to your interview on February 2nd
Shave your full body and write as many kanji as possible to show commitment to studying
This is for the UK embassy, others will vary in their approach:
Don’t get too bogged down in preparation. The interview questions are impossible to predict (there’s a list of literally hundreds and you might be asked half a dozen at best) and it seems to be a coin flip as to whether they’ll ask you to prove teaching or language competency. If there’s one question you’re almost certain to get, it’s ‘why japan’, solely to give you an opportunity to demonstrate you gave it thought. The reason doesn’t have to be anything deep. For example, I wanted to teach somewhere reasonably familiar (services, tech, etc.) that isn’t obsessed with rushing around and bordering an unstable nation (South Korea) and isn’t in the midst of committing genocide (China), that was enough for them.
You’ll see a lot of people ask what sort of mock lesson they should prepare. You don’t prepare. The interviewer will give you a set of conditions and ask you to come up with it on the spot, so any time spent doing anything other than practicing your delivery will be wasted time.
If you’ve said you speak Japanese, make sure you keep up your regular practice. I don’t myself but heard from a few who felt confident but cocked up in the interview because they’d not kept up with it for months or had to read and describe something unwieldy. Those people still passed, so don’t stress too much. Obviously being fluent would be good for your marks but they’re not going to drag you over coals for a bit of stuttering and nervous mumbling.
Make sure you have an honest and reasoned thought process behind your SoP answers. If you genuinely think the things you wrote then recalling why you wrote them and how they’re important will be the easiest thing in the world and the interviewers will be able to see the difference between your sincerity and those treating it like a box ticking exercise. On the subject of how you come across to the interviewers:
**Don’t talk about anime**. It shouldn’t need to be said but it comes up constantly in the SoPs and interviews of people who didn’t get through. They know people like it, they know people probably downplay their interest and are often massive weebs, they still get turned off by seeing it. The ex-JET interviewer might be cool about it, but most Japanese people have the same attitude as the west, that it’s childish and weird to like it into adulthood. The Japanese interviewer will be unimpressed.
Tl;dr: don’t over-prepare. Keep up on your language learning. Focus on delivery rather than content for teaching. Be honest, don’t kiss Japan’s ass. Check your otaku hat with security and collect it on the way out.
Good luck!
Dress business! Some people came to interview at the same time as me in turtlenecks/hoodies and I never saw them again.
Re-read your SoP, be prepared to give more details about what`s on there and don`t stress the Japanese test, it`s just bonus points. Maybe just remember how to say “Could you please repeat slower?” or something like that, just in case.
It’s an interview so honestly any interview advice will work that you can look up on the internet.
Anyway, here are two things I did before my interview that I found helped me.
If you like practice interview questions, a way I find works well is to just to list 1-2 key points and then practice structuring it into full answers. That way you can practice answering but you don’t fall into the trap of sounding pre-rehearsed.
If you’re the type to get nervous then step it up a notch by looking up interview practices on YouTube, getting dressed up and setting up your area so it looks and feels like an interview. The questions don’t matter but practice breathing and pausing/thinking before answering can help you practice staying calm. This can help trick your interviewers into thinking your cool and confident even when you’re shaking so much you drop your water bottle.
I am type A as fuck so i made an interview prep sheet with various talking points/mock lesson prompts (but NO specific examples so I would have to improv) and things i liked about myself and questions to ask them and studied it over and over again and presented to my squishmallow collection (a harsh group) until it was a natural response. I made all of my bullet points vague so that I had to add new/varied details each time but still got the main ideas across.
In the actual interview I didn’t even need to look at my notes because I had the concepts in my mind and had smoothly delivered my ideas to my big plushy frog 5 times that week. You don’t need to do all this but i DO suggest explaining the same big ideas concisely a couple of different ways to an audience so you have that skill practiced. Obv i don’t have a position (yet?) but i did leave the interview feeling good with no regrets about what i did/did not get to say.
8 comments
That’s a very broad question.
Have you started by looking through [this subreddit’s FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/JETProgramme/wiki/index/#wiki_application_.26amp.3B_interview_process) and [used the search bar](https://www.reddit.com/r/JETProgramme/search/?q=interview%20tips&restrict_sr=1&sr_nsfw=&include_over_18=1)?
* Search the subreddit (and wider internet) for the many, many advice posts.
* Be yourself, be honest, be presentable
* don’t memorize a bunch of pre written answers, you’ll sound bad and they’ll know
* re-read your SOP so you know what you said.
Go to your interview on February 2nd
Shave your full body and write as many kanji as possible to show commitment to studying
This is for the UK embassy, others will vary in their approach:
Don’t get too bogged down in preparation. The interview questions are impossible to predict (there’s a list of literally hundreds and you might be asked half a dozen at best) and it seems to be a coin flip as to whether they’ll ask you to prove teaching or language competency. If there’s one question you’re almost certain to get, it’s ‘why japan’, solely to give you an opportunity to demonstrate you gave it thought. The reason doesn’t have to be anything deep. For example, I wanted to teach somewhere reasonably familiar (services, tech, etc.) that isn’t obsessed with rushing around and bordering an unstable nation (South Korea) and isn’t in the midst of committing genocide (China), that was enough for them.
You’ll see a lot of people ask what sort of mock lesson they should prepare. You don’t prepare. The interviewer will give you a set of conditions and ask you to come up with it on the spot, so any time spent doing anything other than practicing your delivery will be wasted time.
If you’ve said you speak Japanese, make sure you keep up your regular practice. I don’t myself but heard from a few who felt confident but cocked up in the interview because they’d not kept up with it for months or had to read and describe something unwieldy. Those people still passed, so don’t stress too much. Obviously being fluent would be good for your marks but they’re not going to drag you over coals for a bit of stuttering and nervous mumbling.
Make sure you have an honest and reasoned thought process behind your SoP answers. If you genuinely think the things you wrote then recalling why you wrote them and how they’re important will be the easiest thing in the world and the interviewers will be able to see the difference between your sincerity and those treating it like a box ticking exercise. On the subject of how you come across to the interviewers:
**Don’t talk about anime**. It shouldn’t need to be said but it comes up constantly in the SoPs and interviews of people who didn’t get through. They know people like it, they know people probably downplay their interest and are often massive weebs, they still get turned off by seeing it. The ex-JET interviewer might be cool about it, but most Japanese people have the same attitude as the west, that it’s childish and weird to like it into adulthood. The Japanese interviewer will be unimpressed.
Tl;dr: don’t over-prepare. Keep up on your language learning. Focus on delivery rather than content for teaching. Be honest, don’t kiss Japan’s ass. Check your otaku hat with security and collect it on the way out.
Good luck!
Dress business! Some people came to interview at the same time as me in turtlenecks/hoodies and I never saw them again.
Re-read your SoP, be prepared to give more details about what`s on there and don`t stress the Japanese test, it`s just bonus points. Maybe just remember how to say “Could you please repeat slower?” or something like that, just in case.
It’s an interview so honestly any interview advice will work that you can look up on the internet.
Anyway, here are two things I did before my interview that I found helped me.
If you like practice interview questions, a way I find works well is to just to list 1-2 key points and then practice structuring it into full answers. That way you can practice answering but you don’t fall into the trap of sounding pre-rehearsed.
If you’re the type to get nervous then step it up a notch by looking up interview practices on YouTube, getting dressed up and setting up your area so it looks and feels like an interview. The questions don’t matter but practice breathing and pausing/thinking before answering can help you practice staying calm. This can help trick your interviewers into thinking your cool and confident even when you’re shaking so much you drop your water bottle.
I am type A as fuck so i made an interview prep sheet with various talking points/mock lesson prompts (but NO specific examples so I would have to improv) and things i liked about myself and questions to ask them and studied it over and over again and presented to my squishmallow collection (a harsh group) until it was a natural response. I made all of my bullet points vague so that I had to add new/varied details each time but still got the main ideas across.
In the actual interview I didn’t even need to look at my notes because I had the concepts in my mind and had smoothly delivered my ideas to my big plushy frog 5 times that week. You don’t need to do all this but i DO suggest explaining the same big ideas concisely a couple of different ways to an audience so you have that skill practiced. Obv i don’t have a position (yet?) but i did leave the interview feeling good with no regrets about what i did/did not get to say.
Do your best!! You are gonna crush it.