Want to Perform Your Best at Your Next Internship Interview?

Entry by Pat Patterson

Aside from the usual interview preparation – researching the organization and opportunity, preparing answers to questions, dressing in appropriate professional attire, etc. – the key to performing your best at your next internship interview is to get enough sleep the night before, so be prepared to catch some zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzs………

According to studies discussed in Brain Rules, a book by molecular biologist Dr. John Medina, sleep helps our brains function at peak performance:

To highlight this, Medina refers to a study in which math graduate students were given a problem and told the way to solve it. 

“It was a bonehead solution,” Medina says. “Unbeknownst to students, there was a much more elegant way to solve the math problem.”

The researchers, who wanted to study the effect of sleep on cognition, broke the students into two groups, Group A and Group B. With 12 hours to solve the problem, members of Group A remained awake, while members of Group B slept for eight hours. The results? Twenty percent of Group A members and 65 percent of Group B members discovered and applied the “better” way to solve the problem. 

“There were some very strong conclusions about the effect of sleep on cognitive function,” Medina says. 

Sleep is deeply connected with learning. As Medina points out, we accumulate a lot of information during each day. 

“When we go to sleep, we begin to replay what we learned thousands of times and create a massive record of it,” he explains. “If we don’t get a good night’s sleep, we don’t get that massive record and we don’t learn. For the longest time, we didn’t know why we needed to sleep. Now we know: We need to sleep in order to learn.”

Getting a good night’s sleep is particularly important for college students, Medina says, because what students do in college—from the grades they get to their selections of courses, majors, and, ultimately, jobs—can have a profound impact on the rest of their lives. 

So…if you are up late at night reading this post  and you have an interview tomorrow or even a big exam, it may be best to turn the lights off already and “hit the sack”!

Good luck!