Esinam was camera-shy going into interviews but learned to handle unexpected questions by pausing, timing her response, and structuring answers clearly. Regular group practice through Consultant Stepping Up Days built her discipline and taught her diverse ways to talk about her strengths.
So in general, I've always felt a little bit nervous about interviews. I had joined Consultant Stepping Up Days where interview prep was sort of addressed in terms of the kind of questions you might anticipate. I mean, preparing for it, it can be quite daunting. Yeah. And I'm not one to sit down with a book and just read a book, so I did find the course quite useful. Cool. Just because it helps you to sort of get out of your internal shell and to get you practicing. For me, what stresses me out most is that I'm actually quite camera shy. So for me, I think the challenging bit would have been actively preparing in a live group. To be honest, I didn't actively take part in that. I was sort of a passive observer, but even that helped in terms of thinking about what my USPs are. So I found that quite useful. I found answers to all of the questions, to most of the questions. So what didn't go as expected is that the example that I hadn't planned to use is the one that I ended up using for the question. Okay. And then there were 2 or 3 questions which I should have known or knew that were going to come, and I again didn't have like the perfect answer for it because I hadn't sort of thought through those questions and examples of how to answer them. So what did you do when that happened? Well, I mean, I, I paced myself. I thought about the, you know, the duration of how I need to answer the questions, make sure that I have sort of an introduction and a summary, asked for a minute or so to compose my thoughts before answering a question. So I tried to utilize those techniques. It's useful to join if you are somebody who's not very self-disciplined in being regular with practice, even if you are self-disciplined. The advantage is that you have a great pool of people to interact with and to learn from how different people verbalize or answer questions, or also just to help you brainstorm about what might be an ideal example to use when answering questions which you might not have thought of. I also think that the program has given me the opportunity to learn a bit more about the NHS, and, and, you know, you have a whole list of things, of documents that we should read, that can actually be a good way of understanding how the NHS works, which again, during training, isn't something that you focus on.
