Interview
What is your full name? My full name is [Your Name]. It holds profound personal and cultural meaning in my family, and I bring it with me through life with deep pride.
May I see your ID? Of course, here it is. By all means, have a look.
Where are you from? I’m originally from [Your City/Country]. It is a very colorful, rich in culture place and has played a huge role in shaping me who I am today.
Do you work or study? Study HistoryOrLiterature at university. It is a rigorous but immensely fulfilling course and I have started finding myself truly interested in both the concepts behind the programme as well as its real-world applications more than ever.
Do you wear a watch? I do, yes — maybe even intentionally in an era when so many depend on smartphones for telling time. I wear a fairly modest mechanical watch inherited from my grandfather, with evident sentimental value on top of its utility function. There is something — obviously I’m going to say this because I love watches — genuinely nice about the tangibility of a watch; the habit of looking at your wrist instead of unlocking a screen feels both more classy and infinitely less likely to turn into a twenty-minute detour from whatever it was I was doing when I needed to know what time it was.
Do you have one talent or work that you are very good at? As far as any talents I perhaps possess, I would say the most fully developed is for analytical writing — to take terrible, complex and multi-faceted topics that may resist comprehension, or who cannot do so without being too technical and present them in methods that are both rigorous as well as genuinely accessible to readers without specialist background. It has consciously been created rather over many years, but I suspect the underlying ability to construct a stream of pure logical thought was probably there from quite early on. My ability to listen to music for structure and harmony — a different type of hearing coefficient available from normal casual listeners — is fairly developed too, but I never turned this into performance ability, which I somewhat regret.
Did it get mastered last week, or did you hear it growing up? My actual writing ability developed slowly and seriously from my mid-teens, when a keen teacher recognised in my early essays something I had yet to see in myself and offered both encouragement, along with the kind of very specific but honest criticism that is necessary if one is to improve deliberately. The musical sensitivity, however, comes as much more of a birthright to me — I remember having an analytical ear for harmonic relations in music from very early on without the vocabulary or articulation to describe what I was experiencing.
Would you find your talent helpful in the job that you will do? Why? Yes, and actually the analytical writing capacity has been already central to my studies and seems directly related to many of the professional pathways that I am interested in seriously pursuing. Being able to express and defend within 1000 words the most complex of ideas with clarity and precision is one of the most widely honored skills in nearly every knowledge-based field — be it research, policy, law, education or business — and I consider myself extremely fortunate indeed that I have developed this skill close to as well as I have. Music sensitivity is less vocationally oriented, but imbue my life with enjoyment that I can hardly overestimate.
Just out of curiosity do you think anyone on your family shares the same talent? I think I inherited both the analytical writing aptitude and inclination from her — my mother is a remarkably talented practitioner of this skill. She was an outstanding literature student and writes with a clarity that, just to name the two best reasons for not admitting you are jealous of someone else, I admire. Musical sensitivity seems more distinctly genetically mine within the nuclear family, though my maternal grandfather — whose watch I wear — was apparently a full-time amateur musician so presumably some genetic lineage to the gift coursed through us even if it seems skipped a generation in expression.