Describe Yourself

I'm definitely someone who is more comfortable speaking up if I have somewhat planned out what I want to say. As you could imagine, interviews don't usually go super well for me. Practice makes perfect, and of course, I should practice in front of a mirror or on camera, but I'm also going to take it back a step even further and start a series of writing posts where I backtrack my worst-answered interview questions and write what my new ideal answer would be if I had the chance to do try again.

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How would people who know you well describe you?

My friends and family members, especially my teammates, would describe me as perseverant.

On top of how perseverant you need to be in a team sports game to try and win, there were people who said I would never even play at UNC and that I was just taken as a practice player. I battled a lot of self-doubt but worked my hardest and played in every game my freshman year. That year we won the ACC Championship and competed in the NCAA Final Four, all while needing to practice and play at Duke because we didn't have a home field.

Then the next two years I wasn't seeing as much playing time as I had wanted and thought I had worked hard to earn. I scheduled meetings with coaches for feedback, asked teammates to help me with my skills and fitness, sought support from my parents and close friends and still didn't see the change I wanted.

At the same time, I was training every summer and taking classes in hopes to earn playing time, which made me feel like I was missing out on summer internships that my classmates were taking advantage of. I got down on myself pretty hard and felt like a failure in both aspects of being a student-athlete.

I really had to strip everything down to the core, figure out what I really wanted and what my ultimate goals were. I poured my life into preparing myself to play field hockey in college and I decided I owed it to myself to not quit, to try my hardest and at least try to find joy in the game again. Even when I felt like everyone was against me reaching this goal, I enjoyed spending time with my closest friends on the team.

With this in mind, I found joy and satisfaction in my summer training and earned a starting spot on the team my senior year. This past year, in a pandemic, we won the ACC Championship for the fourth consecutive time, I scored a goal to help win the NCAA National Championship for the third time in a row (with only one loss across the three years), and I earned All-ACC Academic Team honors and other honors for playing. Not to mention, I was able to work for CanDu Media as an intern in the middle of field hockey season, something I never would have thought possible.

Can you give an example in an academic/work setting?

In my MEJO 121 course, Introduction to Digital Storytelling, I was tasked with assignments that would build up into creating my final project. I decided to choose a bit of a more challenging topic because it was accessible to me, which was interviewing an international student-athlete about her experience. I interviewed my teammate because we had the same schedule, but because she was redshirting and didn't play in the games, our coach decided last-minute to let her go visit family in another state for a week. So halfway through my project I didn't have a subject for an assignment and had to scramble to find someone else and redo parts of the assignment. Instead of skipping it, I had to quickly restart my interview plans, reschedule video recording, and plan extra time to get to work on it. It ended up very successful and I did well in my final project and in the class.