Genre: Nonfiction

The interview was the chosen way to find out the thoughts of a selected few in the topic of interest. Doing this interview was much harder than I was expecting. When I first read the assignment, I had thought this would not be a big deal and I would not be nervous. To my not-so surprise, it was much more nerve-wracking and intimidating.

The interviewee was a teacher from my tutoring school, an English teacher to be exact. Though he didn’t have much knowledge in the area the questions touched on, I decided on him because of his mastery of the English language. Not only that, but most of the questions I asked were pretty standard and straightforward enough, in my opinion, to keep a constant baseline for his answers.

The teacher successfully answered most, but some threw him off. Maybe it was because the interview I conducted was academically important and he did not want his answers — or anything for that matter — to affect my scoring, or he expected perfection from himself, so when he stumbled a little in the interview he felt embarrassed. Since I did not have any experience in conducting interviews, I did not know what to say or do to help in the situation. I was as nervous, if not more so than the teacher. Otherwise, I thought the interview went well and I kept good eye contact and a smile on my face. I am generally apathetic but for the interview, to create a warm personality to avoid putting the teacher on edge, I was able to maintain that for its whole duration.

The point of the interview was to get an overview of the effect of social media on the mental health of students, and though it was too early to say, I am sure I accomplished that aim.