CSSA Blog @ Oregon State University

These questions were compiled from people who went through the job search at the end of the 06-07 school year. All of these questions were actually asked in the interview process.

1) Tell me about yourself.

2) What distinguishes you from other candidates?

3) Why are you interested in this position?

4) Tell me why you feel you’re qualified for this position? OR What has prepared you to take on this position? OR Why
do you feel prepared for this position?

5) Why are you interested in this institution? What makes you a good fit for this type of institution? (ie,public, private, religiously affiliated, etc.)

6) How would you define a good relationship with an administrative assistant?

7) How would you define a good relationship with the supervisor?

8) What is your experience in partnering with parents? How do you view the role of parents in higher education?

9) Tell me about any supervisory experience that you have.

10) What can you bring to this position that is unique? OR How do you stand out from other candidates applying for this position?

11) What is your definition of diversity?

12) How will you incorporate diversity into your work?

13) What are some of your personal biases? How do those biases factor into your work as a student affairs administrator?

14) Share a time when you had to work with conflict. What was the situation? How did you resolve it?

15) Discuss a time when you had to de-escalate a situation. How did you handle that?

16) How do you deal with stress? How will your coworkers know if you are feeling stressed?

17) Describe a situation in which you had to make a difficult choice. How did you make that choice? What were the motivating factors?

18) Describe your role when working in a team.

19) How do you plan to integrate yourself into the new institutional culture?

20) What is your leadership style? Describe a time when you had to lead. Describe a time when you had to follow.

21) Talk about a time when you disagreed with a decision made by a supervisor. How did you communicate this disagreement? How did you come to peace with the decision made?

22) How do you keep yourself organized? How do you ensure that tasks you are assigned are completed in a timely manner?

23) What steps do you take to ensure positive, ongoing communication with your supervisors, supervisees, and students?

24) How do you handle confrontation?  Describe a time when a student, parent, or colleague directly confronted or challenged you.

25) Tell us about your most difficult professional challenge to date. How did you handle that? What did you learn from that situation?

26) What is your Meyers-Briggs type? Do you think that it accurately describes you?

27) What is your “ideal office”?

28) What are your thoughts on working evenings and weekends?

29) Describe partnerships that you have formed outside of your current office. How did you go about forming these partnerships?

30) Tell us about any professional organizations to which you belong.

31) Describe your presentation style. Tell us about a time that you presented to a large group.

32) How do you see yourself promoting the mission/vision/values of our student affairs division? Our individual office? (This question came up a lot, and stumped a lot of us who had failed to REALLY research the institution to which we were applying)

33) How would your current supervisor describe you? If your supervisor could only use three words to describe you, what three words would those be?

34) What do you believe are the most pressing social justice issues today? How do you plan to help combat social injustice?

35) You will be joining an already-existing team. Please share with us how you will go about building trust with your new coworkers. How will you build trust with the students with whom you will work?

36) What are your thoughts on student development theories? Which theories to you use in practice the most? Which theories to you most strongly ascribe to? Which theories do you dismiss from your practice? And Why?

For those of you applying for live-in positions:

1) How do you plan to strike the work-life balance?

2) You will be literally living where you work. How will you set boundaries between you and your students?

3) How will you set boundaries between you and your student staff?

4) Being a hall/resident director requires odd hours and a 40 hour work week isn’t always possible. This contributes to a high burn-out rate. What is your plan to stay rejuvenated?

5) How will we know when you’ve been assigned too much to do?

6) How will you identify for yourself when you are in over your head?

**GOOD LUCK TO ALL OF YOU JOB SEARCHERS!!**

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Jill - Alumna. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.