Trading in my suit and tie for a cloak and dagger

I was a bit of a peculiarity yesterday (more than usual) when I walked into McColl wearing a suit and tie. The reason for the costume was an interview I had in school with three people from a local software company for a business development internship.

The questions asked were some of the more challenging and unusual ones I have gotten in an interview this year so far. The man from corporate recruiting asked about the best and the worst class I have taken at Kenan-Flagler. The Kenan-Flagler alum who currently works in marketing asked how I would go about evaluating whether the company should enter markets in Latin America, Russia, or China. He asked the risks and other considerations involved. The senior director of business development (a Fuqua grad) stopped me in the middle of my resume walk-through to ask why I believe AOL has lost its status as the leading internet company. He later asked for my opinion on where different countries around the world are heading economically. He then asked why I believe the United States is ahead economically than other countries and what these other countries would have to do to get to where the United States is currently. This is a good example of what I wrote about earlier about how difficult it is to prepare for interviews and that oftentimes I end up giving answers that don’t come from the work I did in preparation for the interview but from others news sources that I regularly consume.

I walked out of the interview feeling more like I have just interviewed for an analyst position with the Central Intelligence Agency than with a software company. I am hoping that maybe this whole “we are considering you for a business development position at (name of the company)” is just a cover story and that I am being recruited for a position as a spy for the government, think of Sydney Bristol in Alias or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in True Lies.