Mock Panel

Three panellists, twenty-two minutes, and a timer nobody in the room controls, including the panel. You have had eight weeks to build materials; this is the first week anybody makes you defend them while being looked at.

Bring#

Your revised materials from week 8, the target they were fitted to, and four questions you would genuinely want answered before accepting the job. Not four flattering questions. Four real ones.

The panel#

Each student sits one panel and observes two. Observers score against a sheet with three lines only: did the answer address the question actually asked, was there a decision in the story, and did the recovery from the weakest moment work. That third line is the one people are surprised by, because it is the one that most predicts how the room feels afterwards.

Your stream runs its field’s actual convention rather than a generic interview:

• Technical Practice — mixed live-technical and behavioural. You will be asked to reason out loud while stuck. Being stuck is the assessable part.
• Creative and Communications Practice — a portfolio walkthrough that gets interrupted on purpose, twice, so you rehearse returning to your thread instead of restarting it.
• Commercial and Public Practice — a competency panel run against the written criteria, marked the way a real selection panel marks: against the criterion, not against how much you said.

Interview weather gets named in the debrief every time. If the panel was cold, we say so out loud and then separate it from what you controlled.

Declaring your route#

At the end of the tutorial everyone writes a single line: where the interview in their capstone debrief is coming from. Either you have a real interview confirmed or in train, or you opt into the Practice Interview Partner Pool, coordinated by Margot Tse.

Pool interviewers are recruiters and practitioners who have given signed written consent knowing they are conducting a practice interview for a course. Nobody is deceived, and nobody who has not consented is approached. The debrief is graded identically either way, on the same criteria, by the same markers — see the capstone.

Most cohorts split roughly evenly, and the split moves week to week for reasons that have nothing to do with the people in it. Hiring runs to its own calendar. The declaration is an artefact, not a verdict on how your semester is going.

Leaving with#

Dossier §10: your interview prep pack — your three anecdotes indexed by the questions each one answers, your four questions for them, and one page on recovery — plus the route declaration, dated and signed by you.