A few great tips to survive the interview season

It’s interview season. This is the time of year that students are (quite often) thrown to the wolves and made to stick their noses in someone else’s business. But the interview process doesn’t need to be so scary. Here are a few survival tips.

Undoubtedly, around this time j-school students have conducted their first interviews of the year. For first years, this usually means doing streeters and a lot of hard news, and for fourth-years, like myself, it could mean trying not to drown in interviews when researching a gigantic feature story. I’ve done scores of interviews by this point and I can say authoritatively that the process has not gotten much easier.

So here’s a little bit of weekend homework. Tony Rogers posted today on his About.com journalism blog about one important skill that journalists just never stop cultivating: interviewing. He linked to a selection of About articles that offer tips on everything from getting the best quotes to taking the best notes.

If you’ve got time to check out these cheat-sheets over your Thanksgiving weekend, do so. You may just find that your post-turkey interviews go a whole lot smoother.