Interviews, even for people who appear onstage often, are still stressful. It often helps to have some prepared notes handy so you can spend more brainpower on the actual interview and less brainpower on remembering things. Pictured above is page one of a three-page set of notes from a recent interview; I can share this one because it’s generic enough that it didn’t need too much redacting.
I strongly recommend that if time allows, write your interview notes by hand instead of typing them. Here are my reasons why:
- Writing by hand buys you extra time to think. The slow, deliberate process of writing something down gives you an opportunity to think about things, including what the interviewer might be looking for, and what you might what to say or emphasize during the interview. I often come up with an interesting new angle or idea, thanks to the extra time writing requires.
- Writing by hand helps you remember what you wrote. Again, it’s about the process being deliberate: writing by hand requires you to use your fine motor control to form letters, and forming letters is different for each letter — you use a different set of motions to write “b” than you do when writing “M”. Typing uses a similar motion for write different letters; the only difference is their location on the keyboard. Writing those letters engages more “muscle memory” than typing, which “locks in” those facts better.
- Writing by hand requires you to pay attention to what you’re writing. Audrey van der Meer, Brain researcher and Professor of Neuropsychology at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), says this about typing to ake notes in class: “It’s very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying. It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.” I find the same is true for taking down pre-interview notes.