Great minds, don't think about gas stations.

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This past week I joined some of my younger wahoos at the Get On the Street networking event at Public House. Get On the Street a the University of Virginia is an on grounds organization (student run) that creates a connection between current students and alumni that are in the corporate jobs. Not surprisingly, most corporate and communication jobs are lacking in the diversity department (specs of pepper in a mound of salt, if you catch the drift). The purpose of this initiative is to change that! Of course, when a friend reached out to me about it - this is exactly the type of program I'd love to lend a hand to.
Anyhoo, talking to some of these fourth years reminded me of my interview experiences and getting my feet wet in the marketing/communications world! My first interview was with a search marketing company in Charlottesville, Va-  I was a third year at the time and I had no idea what to expect. I thought it was going to be thinking of clever tags for articles so they would show up in Google at the top of the search results list ... wrong. Apparently, you have to be good in math to be in search marketing. When I arrived they decided to test my skills with excel formulas (fail), then they sent me to a room with 5 chairs and a dry erase board. When the 5 suits entered the room, I was asked to figure out how many ping-pongs would fit in the room. I wasn't privy to the size of the room OR the size of a ping pong for that matter. Needless to say I started to tell jokes about how great I was at math  - my interviewed turned into a Friday night comedy routine. Five minutes later with my not so future employers entertained; they said - "Danielle, let's forget the ping pong balls, how many gas stations are there in the United States?" No joke. Blank stare. They were serious! I made up some lame story about how I was from a town with two gas stations and I'm sure that wasn't indicative of an average US city, so I didn't have a good perspective to answer the question.  Embarrassed, discouraged and disjointed - I went to my car and cried. Granted, these types of interview questions aren't expected to be spot on they really just want to see how you think - unfortunately, I never think about gas stations.

So a note to my young readers, just getting out there and getting their feet wet: if you think you had a bad interview, think of this one ... it could be worse and I'm still alive and working!