Interviewing: Are you who you say you are?

So, this Monday, I did my final interview for Teach for America, also known as TFA (Brett, does an acronym count as nominalization?). Although I can’t actually disclose any of the questions that were asked or any of the details beyond those that TFA presents on its website, I must say that the overall format of interviews made me think about the identities of the interviewer and the interviewee.


Honestly, as I think most people who meet me already know, I am a quiet person, overall. However, there are some instances in which my persona changes and I try to be loud and outgoing, perhaps even authoritative at times. One of these instances would be when I lead study group. As a study group leader, I have to command attention and bring motivation to my members. When I do these things, it makes me wonder, is this outgoing nature just a different aspect of my personality?  Or am I just completely faking who  I am because the situation demands it?  The more complications I see with theories of the self, the more I am confused about who I am.  Because of Hochschild's theory of the self, I thought what I presented was a false self, but I'm not completely sure. But, getting to the point in time where I can actually say I'm a teacher, first requires that I interview to be offered a position as a teacher, as is the case with any other job.

During an interview, you would to repress some emotions and present false ones. One of the parts of my TFA interview was that I had to present a 5-minute teaching lesson for your fellow interviewees.  When I did my 5-minute teacher lesson, I kind of thought that I had failed. The college students in the room seemed like they didn’t understand what I had just taught them, and they already had taken chemistry as high school students! How could I be an effective chemistry teacher to students who had never seen this material before if I couldn’t even reach college students. In this case, I felt a lot of emotional stress. But, was the emotional stress that I felt because I was repressing my emotions of nervousness so that the interviewers and other interviewees wouldn’t pick up on it, or was it just because of the fact that I was stressed. Am I perhaps reading too far into the emotions? Maybe it’s not the repression of emotions that’s painful, maybe it’s just the act of experiencing those emotions.

Not even discussing emotion work, Hochschild says that flight attendants and others in the service community present multiple false identities. But, after this interview, it made me think that maybe it’s not just the service industries or teaching that involves false identities, it’s almost every aspect of everyone’s life that involves these false presentations. When you interview, are you really yourself? I think the best answer to this is most often, “not if you want to get the job.” I often hear that the whole point of interviewing is so that the company can learn who you are. The same is true of the medical school application process. But, most people don’t really present who they are. I know many people who volunteer because they have to if they want to get into the medical profession, not because they want to. Then, they come up with scripted reasons of how volunteering touched them and why it is so important to help the community. Interviews don’t tell the interviewer who the person they are interviewing is; interviews tell these people how good you are at faking who you should be. Can you present a domineering self that can succeed in the classroom? Can you pretend like you really care about a patient, even though you may not?

I’m not saying that we are all heartless, don’t really care about other people, or that some of the things we say in interviews aren’t true, but they definitely don’t evaluate who we really are. The interview should be just another factor in the process. It seems that our personal recommendations should bear more weight, since they are written by people who supposedly actually know who we are. But then again, we choose who we want to write our letters. Have you ever gone to office hours to get help, and instead had to wait while some annoying person asked 80 ridiculously detailed questions, not because they really wanted to know the answers, but because they want the professor to think that they want to know the answers? Then, after we fake who we are to get the letters, and we fake who we are in the interview, if we get the job, we fake some more. Teachers do it, flight attendants, doctors, you name it. It seems like a kind of depressing concept to me the more I think about it; is there even such a thing as the true self, or are we always trying to fulfill roles? Perhaps there is a true self, but are the emotions we feel even from the true self, or are from another false self that society has made that we are trying to present? How can we ever know that the feelings that we feel are really ours? After all, what we define as our morals or our beliefs are often imposed by other people and other social constructs. Perhaps these complications are the reason why Hochschild said that at some point we present so many false selves that we lose the real self. When I first wrote my inquiry paper, I thought that the emotions I felt inside were from my true self, but now I’m starting to wonder if they really are mine, or are just what I think are mine.

I am also thinking more about the dramaturgic self. It seems that this whole concept of presenting a false self is really just acting and presenting false characters. Hochschild tried to look at the bright side of things and say that there is light at the end of the tunnel, that there is a true self though we have trouble finding it sometimes, yet she was in “The Dark Side” chapter. In The Self We Live By (TSWLB), Goffman (who described the self as dramaturgic and socially situated) is quoted as saying that the “self itself does not derive from its possessor, but from the whole scene of his action.” I have trouble seeing the difference between the self Goffman describes and the one Hochschild describes. Both theories say that we all have many selves, and that they all depend on the situation at hand. Is Goffman’s self in the “Formulating a Social Self” chapter while Hochschild’s self is in the “The Dark Side” chapter because Goffman thinks that each socially presented self is a reflection of an aspect of the self, while Hochschild’s false selves are completely fake? In TSWLB, the authors say that “Time and again, Goffman reveals that each and every one of us has many selves, pertinent to the purposes of daily living, always part of, yet also reflexively separate from, the moral orders we share with others.” So Goffman says that we have many selves, but they are not false? But, if they are meeting up to the expectations of the situation, and we are molding them to meet the demands of that situation, how is that not fake? Perhaps it is because I am now brainwashed by the ideas of Hochschild that I don’t understand how the selves we can present can be real selves. Alas, I am lost again in TSWLB. Tell me your thoughts :-D