Preparing for Interviews? Be Ready to Discuss a Setback

By Sandy Antunes

"Tell us about a time when you failed." 

Why? Because every interview brings this dreaded question.  Sometimes it's "when a project went wrong" or "when your team had a disagreement" or a dozen variants. Ultimately it is a question about overcoming difficulty. Rooted is the core thought that you learn from mistakes; thus they want a juicy yet professional challenge that you overcame.

This question can set students into a panic. Students talk about their As, not their Fs. They think bad stuff is their fault. What we professors see as teachable moments or great stories, a lot of students see as personal failure. An important thing to realize in engineering is that (a) setbacks will happen and (b) project setbacks are not personal failures. In fact, if you are really pushing the limits in engineering, setbacks are a likely and frequent (but temporary) companion.

What is important is learning from problem situations, and keeping moving forward-- which is the true goal of the interview question.  They don't really care about the actual incident or disaster. They want to know what you learned from it. And, ideally, that you showed resilience as well.

Sarah Alspaw here at Capitol introduced me to the Situation- Action - Outcome - Learning (SAOL) system (from the National Association of Colleges and Employers) for telling your interview stories.  There's also the STAR method: Situation, Task, Action, Results. In both, you lay out your anecdote with a setup, a crisis, and the outcome. Then the key part-- hint, it isn't the story-- is the last one, the Learning.

Call it lessons learned, call it a moral or a homily, it's the part that ties up your story like an Aesop's Fable, like a Veggie Tales "What we have learned" moment.  Ira Glass of NPR's This American Life defines a story as "a series of events", followed by a "moment of reflection", and that the moment of reflection is the key part.  That's also the goal of your interview story-- to provide a compelling lesson learned that tells the interviewer you are a person that tackles challenges and learns from mistakes.

Since you know the interviewers will be feeling you out on this, you can provide your own interview bait by pre-thinking a crisis or two that you weathered. You can use your prepared stories even if they don't exactly match the question. Question: "Tell us of a time when you disagreed with a decision".  Diverting the answer to your prepared scenario, "well, I remember one time when a project went wrong, and we had to argue over how to fix it." Boom, go into your interview bait story.

In fact, that reminds me of a time when… oh darn, we're out of time.  But someday ask me about the time an article of mine got rejected, and how it inspired me to write about interview bait and lessons learned.  Who knows, that might be an interesting piece!

Alex "Sandy" Antunes is professor of astronautical engineering at Capitol Technology University