I had my first job interview today, with Microsoft‘s marketing people.
I think it went pretty decently, though the obvious questions of “So, um, if you haven’t taken any marketing courses, why should we hire you?” and “If you like music so much, why do you want to go the corporate route?” came up.
It’s not that I don’t want to do music anymore, it’s that I can’t go into the music business. It’s a discouraging shitpile and I’d blow my brains out if I worked for someplace like Interscope for more than a month.
I couldn’t exactly give the interviewer the Hunter S. Thompson quote that’s been on the end of my profile for months about the music business being a cruel, shallow money trench yadda yadda, but I think I managed to answer the question pretty well anyway (not with the above response, obviously).
I really hope the interview went well, since they’re flying whoever they decide to fly back to Redmond for second-round interviews, and I really dug Seattle when I went a couple years ago for a music conference.
What my chances of actually getting the job are (they interviewed a least 200 people at various colleges, from what I could extrapolate from the number of people they were talking to here and the number of colleges they were going to, and there’s 40 positions), I’m not so sure.
But I feel like I gave myself at least a fighting chance, and that’s what I went into the interview hoping for.
And I didn’t hear nearly as many Evil Empire cracks (about 5) as I was expecting (5,000,000) when I told my friends about the interview.