Answers to Possible Interview Questions

If I met some of your peers from college, what do you think they would say about you?

• My peers at college would say I am hard working, because when I work on something, I don't stop until it's done right and congruent with our vision; resourceful, because I utilize every resource, think outside of the box, and persevere until I've found something; and able to work alone, because I can get work done on my own just as well as working together.

What extracurricular activities were you active in during college?

• In college I was apart of Women's Choir, I lead a Life Group, I got hired as the Lead Web Designer and Manager for the Talon newspaper, and I got voted president of the Northwest University Communication Association, the departmental student club, as well as participating in social activities put on by the Student Life department.

Were there any unusual difficulties you had to overcome to do so well in college? How did you overcome these problems?

• Well, one difficulty I think would be going to college as a foster care alumni. Half of foster youth drop out of high school, and only 1-3% of foster youth ever earn a college degree. It's hard because of the unique financial situation, and not many university employees even know how to deal with foster care alumni, especially financial aid, academic success, and housing. But I was lucky enough to be fully scholarshipped for my entire college career, which is what I would consider college, a career.

Do you prefer to work by yourself or with others?

• Although I am able to work alone just as well, and sometimes work my best that way, I actually prefer to work with others. After I took the StrengthsFinder test, a requirement for campus leaders, I found out that "Individualization" was one of my top strengths, which is defined as a gift for figuring out how people who are different can work together productively

Tell me something about yourself that I won’t find on your resume.

• You won't find on my resume that I have a pet house bunny named Walter. I love having him, he acts half dog, half cat, and is litter box trained. You also won't find that I was really involved in high school, I did photography, art, cheer, student council, and I also was voted senior 'best smile' and 'artistically gifted.'

Evaluated Personal Strengths from 5 Good Experiences

Top Strengths

• Persevere, Hard Working (8)
• Resourceful (6)
• Able to Work Alone (6)

Complete List of Scores from Reading 5 Good Experiences
Social (4)
Helping (2)
Empathy, Caring for Others (3)
Listening (3)
Encouraging
Service
Composed, Able to handle pressure (2)
Team Player
Comfortable with People (2)
Humor, Fun to Be Around
Motivating (2)
Encouraging (2)
Persuading
Goal Oriented (5)
Organizing (4)
Meeting Deadlines (2)
Time Management (3)
Administrative Skills
Directing, Managing People (2)
Planning, Coordinating (1)
Developing a Budget
Managing Money (3)
Keeping Financial Records (2)
Following Through on Plans (4)
Logical, Analytical (4)
Intelligence (4)
Able to Work Alone (6)
Prepared
Worship
Idealistic (2)
Calling From the Lord
Social Justice
Manual Dexterity (3)
Ethical
Inventing (3)
Resourceful (6)
Able to Concentrate (2)
Strategizing (3)
Problem Solving (4)
Seeing How Parts Fit Into a Whole (5)
Responsible, Dependable (3)
Taking Chances, Risk Taker (3)
Perservere, Hard Working (8)
Innovative (2)
Initiative, Beginning New Tasks (4)
Entrepreneurial, Dreams of New Adventures (3)
Writing (4)
Reading
Motivating
Artistic (4)
Expressive (4)
Fixing, Repairing (2)
Construction (2)
Nature, Outdoors (2)
Office Equipment
Culinary Skills, Cooking (4)
Agriculture, Growing Plants
Caring for Animals (4)

5th Good Experience

Getting My Bunny, Walter

When I was little I lived with my grandparents on the land they bought several decades ago after my grandpa served as a draftee in the army during the Korean War. It was beautiful! There was a beautiful golden field that stretched out behind our fence for what seemed like miles when I was little. Next to that was a huge vegetable garden where my grandpa still grows HUGE delicious tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, and all kinds of veggies. We had three horses (every little girls dream) named Brownie, Mickey, and Minnie that we used to pet, ride, and feed apples every day during the summer. We had other animals too. We had chickens, a pet turkey that me and my sister named Henry, dogs, and cats. I absolutely loved having so many pets around, it was so much fun, and they were my friends! My little sister even wanted to be a vet when she was really young. But out of all the animal we had there was one animal that was more special to me than any of the other ones. It was an animal that was warm, cuddly, soft, fluffy, and quiet, just like me! They were bunnies, and they were my most favorite animal in the whole wide world!
As I got older the bunnies became more scarce, like the rest of the animals. They were not as easy to find, and they were much harder to pick up. I knew that they weren’t really pets, but that they were wild animals, but I couldn’t help wishing that they were just like the dogs and cats that would walk right over to me and beg me to pet them. Sometimes my younger sister, the “vet”, would be able to get a hold of them, and she would let me play with them and hold them, but they weren’t ever around for very long. Honestly it made me kind of sad sometimes, and the more I thought about it the more I wanted one of my very own.
Around the same time I was having these feelings I met my boyfriend Trevor, and I was so happy. He even said that I reminded him of a bunny! Eventually we moved off to go to the same college, and I moved into a dorm room with a girl that I’d never met, and life seemed to be happening so fast. When I moved away from my family for the very first time in my life it was hard for me. I missed my family a lot and Trevor was working constantly to pay for his tuition. I started looking at bunnies on the internet when I was bored. The more I looked at bunnies and learned more about the different breeds the more enthralled I became with the idea of getting one. However, I knew that I couldn’t ever have a bunny in my dorm room. Foiled again.
A few months after this Trevor proposed to me, and I said yes. This was the busiest time of my life up to that point because I was effectively planning my entire wedding by myself! I was too busy and stressed about my impending nuptials to think about bunnies very much, so the entire idea was put on hold in my head. In March we were married and after our honeymoon moved into an apartment together.
It wasn’t very long after Trevor and I moved into that I got bunny fever again. I was researching bunnies day and night, learning all about the different kinds, their breeding, their temperament, and even their size and ear shape. Within several months I was something of a bunny expert. Finally almost a full year afterwards I was e-mailing breeders and trying to find a bunny that I loved that was everything I wanted. It wasn’t easy because I had very specific things I wanted in my bunny. After dozens of e-mails and conversations with breeders I found the perfect one! He was an orange broken tri Holland lop bunny, and he was the cutest because he was also the runt of his litter. It was love at first sight, at least for me, and my husband immediately e-mailed the breeder to reserve my bunny for when he was old enough to get picked up. I was so happy and I couldn’t wait!
Something went wrong with the order however, and Trevor missed a step in reserving the bunny, he was promised to another prospective owner. I was heartbroken, it was like I’d lost someone I loved, and I knew that I’d never get him back. Eventually I settled on another bunny, and I named him Charles Bennett. He was a great bunny, but he wasn’t very people friendly because his owners were not affectionate with him. Because he was so grumpy we bought him a companion, and we named him Toby. Even though I lost one bunny I figured out how to get two in his place. All of my research and relentless searching had paid off! I had two full bred Holland lop bunnies.
Then the impossible happened. One day the owner of the first bunny that I had wanted e-mailed me. Her name was Sydney and she said that her other buyer had backed out and that she had been looking at the pictures of my bunnies on Facebook. She said that she would trade me the original bunny for the two that I had. She even offered to pay me for them because she said she could breed them! It was amazing. So we packed up our family of bunnies and on our way across the state we dropped off Charles Bennett and Toby to pick up the baby that we had always wanted. We named him Walter, and because I learned the business of breeding bunnies I finally have exactly what I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember. My dream to have a bunny that loves me is one I’ve been carrying for over fifteen years, and it came true this summer. My happily ever after…with a bunny.

Walter at 2 days, 3 weeks, 6 weeks, and adult.

4th Good Experience

Getting Scholarships

Going into my senior year of high school I honestly had no idea what I was dong. I remember spending time at my friend Amy’s house over the summer with my usual group of friends: Skyler who knew he was going to be an engineer, Riley who was Skyler’s best friend and was also planning on attending Washington State University, Annie who’s entire family had graduated from the same university for generations, Isaac who had picked engineering as a major as well years before, Amy who was already practically recruited on a volleyball scholarship to Northwest Nazarene University (like all of her siblings), and of course my boyfriend Trevor who was studying to become a pastor. All of these people seemed like they knew how to get scholarships, how to pay for college, and how to pick not only a school but it seemed like a profession also before they were even ready to start their final year of high school.
Maybe out of sheer desperation I decided that I was going to take a college and career course for seniors, taught by one of my favorite teachers: Mrs. Lambertson. Going into the class I wasn’t sure what to expect, and I certainly had no idea what we would be covering, but I knew that I needed help, and fast. I showed up that first day to my college and career class with my number two pencil sharpened and my college ruled paper ready. But I didn’t take any notes that day. Instead Mrs. Lambertson passed us out these cute red folders and we began to curiously look inside them. The notebooks were not full of rules, equations, and exercises like in my other classes, but they in place contained pieces of paper instructing me how to do real activities that would help me on my way to entering college, and finding scholarships!
It was amazing that semester at school learning about all of the opportunities open to me through college, and the more I learned about myself the more I realized that there were literally hundreds of individual scholarships that I could find. I was given the information by Mrs. Lambertson that would assist me in my goal of entering and paying for college. I was given information that had the ability to change my future, to change the course of my entire life! It was amazing, and I’ll never forget how elated I felt during the process of learning that took place in that class. The more I learned the more college looked like a viable and even completely manageable option.
There was something else I learned about myself during the course of my senior year. I still didn’t know exactly what I wanted to study in college, and I wouldn’t know for several years still. I didn’t know exactly where I wanted to attend college like Amy or Riley, or who my roommate would be like Skyler. But I did discover one thing: I was very good at getting scholarships. I wrote dozens of scholarship essays and continually received feedback from foundations and sponsors that I was being considered as a scholar for many different organizations.
The new scholarships that I was eligible for continued to pour in. Organization after organization began to open up in front of me. That was the easy part. The harder part was finishing the application process. On top of attempting to finish my senior year of high school, being a leader on the cheer squad, a social life, church activity, and homework, I was filling out scholarship applications day and night. I worked harder on those applications than I had ever worked before in my life! When I wasn’t writing an essay for one foundation I was doing hundreds of pages of paperwork for other scholarships that I was being considered for. It was a season of late, late nights, and 6AM mornings, of constant stress and continued elation, and of both frustration and excitement. I made it my goal that year to make finding scholarships a full time job, and although I still didn’t know where I was going, I knew I wanted to go as a scholar.
Finally after months and months of tedious and tiring work everything paid off. I finally applied to Central Washington University in the late spring and eagerly awaited not only the acceptance letter that I was sure I would receive, but the financial aid award letter that I was so scared to receive. The day finally came after graduation that I got a letter in the mail. My boyfriend and I decided to hang out that evening, and we went to a Safeway where we had spent many late nights together in the café which was open late filling out applications and working on those same scholarships together that I was so eager to hear back about. We sat down together and we opened the envelope that contained my financial aid award letter. Inside was a packet of papers that Itemized and specified the tuition for Central Washing University as well as the financial aid I was eligible to receive. We read carefully through the document to make sure that I understood it correctly and we finally came to a comprehension of it. I was scholarshipped one hundred percent for the following year of school. Not only was I scholarshipped fully but I was even scholarshipped for the price of all of the cost of living expenses estimated by the school for the entire year. My hard work had paid off, and I had never been more proud of myself. Through learning my strengths and applying myself I had found my own path, and it was a path that I am thankful for and proud of to this day.

Me with one of my scholarship benefactors

Me at a scholarship event

3rd Good Experience

Getting Voted “Most Artistic” in High School

I never thought I was very artsy when I was young. I knew I loved to color. I always loved to color. I have won at least 11 coloring contests. Mostly I won gift certificates to Old Town Station restaurant, and one time I won one for Home Depot. Coloring was fun. I also built my own doll house as a child, but being artsy was never something I thought I was. That is, until high school, when I won “most artistic” in the senior class.

It all started when I started taking Art as an elective. I took a semester of art one, and I realized I loved doing pieces. We had different assignments, and for some reason, when we would critique completed ones as a class, people would say they liked mine. Eventually I started taking art two, and then I got into senior art, because she let me skip a semester. My art teacher, Mrs. Tranch, liked me a lot, and sometimes I would spend entire lunch periods and study halls in the art room finishing assignments that needed to be done, doing multiple pieces of assignments that were assigned, or doing art that was not even assigned at all as extra work. I would help her clean and organize, and it was fun.

My favorite thing to do, though, was paint acrylic on canvas. I loved that, and I felt I really knew how to work a paint brush. I did other things like sketching, batik, colored pencil, chalk, and collages, but acrylic on canvas was my favorite. My teacher entered several of my pieces to be displayed at the Central Washington State Fair. She also recommended me for an internship at our local arts gallery, the Allied Arts Center of Yakima. I applied, and got the position! I worked there for 5 months during my senior year on top of doing senior class student council and cheer. I worked as an office and gallery assistant. It was there that I got my first graphic design job, designing the official gallery post card for one of the local charity galleries! That made me feel good. At one of those same galleries, I got to enter one of my canvases into the gallery. It didn’t win, but it was good being in the official student gallery art show book. I still have a copy on my bookshelf.

When I was a senior, we voted on Senior Bests, and the class voted me Most Artistic and Best Smile. It was really touching being in the yearbook for something like that.

I see my art teacher now and again. She has a piece or two of mine at the school still that she uses for examples for assignments that I let her keep. She even gave us a wedding present – it was our invitation with a beautiful intricate drawing on top and framed. It sits on our dresser now. In addition, I don’t know what would be hanging on our apartment walls. I miss her sometimes, but I will always attribute my successes to her.

Grown up, art has really helped me; it’s gotten me to where I am today. I even took a few painting classes in college here, and added several of my best canvases to my collection. I am now going into the field of graphic design, and majoring in communication in media studies, and I hope to use visual communication and media ministry at church in my career, since I plan on working in ministry with my husband for the rest of our lives. People say that we are a good team – doing ministry and applying graphic design and visual communication. I started my own graphic design business, and have done several weddings and businesses’ print material. Without taking Art in high school, I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing today and even taking this class in Communication.

Yearbook Page

My first graphic design job.

Sketched Xmas Card

2nd Good Experience

Planning My Own Wedding

I dated my husband for 3 ½ years before we were married. We knew we wanted to get married when we decided to date, because that’s how it worked when you were a couple working as teenage youth leaders in youth ministry together. We met when I was 15, and we’ve been together ever since. After we moved to Northwest University together, we were supposed to get engaged. I knew I wanted to get married in the month of March, because that’s the same month as spring break, and it’s also the best month to go to Disneyland. Well, I waited and waited for him to propose. We went on fancy dates to Disney on Ice and to swing dance classes and to Downtown Seattle at twilight. Each time I thought he would propose, but he didn’t. Time was escaping me. I knew I wanted to get married in March, but with it already the end of November, I didn’t think I would have much time to plan a wedding, and if not we’d have to get married in summer, such a busy time for weddings and honeymooners on vacation, or wait another year. Finally, the day before Thanksgiving Break, he proposed. And it was then that I started planning my own wedding on our own budget without the help of a coordinator on a three month time limit.

Planning my own wedding was hard, but I knew no one else could do it. The day I got engaged, I called my friends and asked if they would be bridesmaids. I picked our colors, pink and blue, colors that have always been significant to us. I also called my friend Jill to do our engagement photos that very weekend when we went home to Yakima for Thanksgiving break. We went home that weekend and took the photos at the local arboretum in the snow, and I digitally edited them that day. I ordered save-the-date refrigerator magnets with our engagement photos on them that week, set for Saturday, March 5^th, 2011, the Saturday at the beginning of spring break the next year. I sent them out over Christmas break so that our family members would know such a soon date.

From then on it was a whirlwind of going home and coming back to Seattle and ordering stuff online. I spent hours of my time in the dorms and the dorm lounge registering for gifts online at Target, Macy’s, and Sears. We also applied for a FIR apartment that December, so that I could stay there by myself until March 5^th, and my husband could move in after we got married. Just three weeks into engagement I ordered invitations so that they would be delivered to me over Christmas break and sent out by the end of January. I also had my wedding dress picked out from an overseas tailor-made dress boutique, the perfect one. It had a poufy princess skirt, lacy tiers, a bow, a lace keyhole back, sequins, and no train. I never went dress shopping; I just took my measurements in my dorm room, typed them into the form online, and ordered my dress for the same price my grandma paid for her wedding dress back in 1956. We traveled to several different wedding venues and churches over Christmas break looking for the perfect one. Finally we found a perfect church in our home neighborhood that didn’t have a rental fee. It was meant to be. My wedding dress came the first week of school in January, when I was homeless staying as a guest in the dorms waiting for my FIR apartment to open up. I tried on my wedding dress in the dorm and walked down the hallway and all my previous floor-mates helped. It made me feel good knowing that they were there for me

I ordered lace gloves, shoes, and bridesmaids’ dresses. I set up bridal showers for my family, my home church in Yakima, and for my bridesmaids. I planned our Disney Fairytale Honeymoon vacation and bought airline tickets. I set up our wedding website where people could RSVP online, view our engagement photos, and browse our wedding registries. We picked our caterer, the Ellensburg Pasta Company, a company of one of my bridesmaids’ family friend. My soon-to-be mother-in-law had a friend and previous coworker who owns a cake decorating shop, and she volunteered to do our wedding cake for free, along with small individual table cakes for each guest table. I asked my friend Kaci who is a photographer if she would shoot our wedding. We asked our friend, Jack, who was my husband’s 80-something year old spiritual mentor, to officiate our wedding and give us premarital counseling. I also met a new friend, Josh, in my speech class, whose wife was a florist, so we asked her to do our flowers.

I was home in Yakima every two weeks for a shower or for catering tasting or counseling or something. When we had the guest list worked out, people RSVP’ed, the food, the venue, the cake, the photographer, the Officiant, the honeymoon, the clothing, the rehearsal dinner, the decorations, the rings, the flowers, I knew that I had nothing else to do. Of course, I was planning up until the morning of, and it was very hectic, but I knew there had to be a stopping point. I don’t really remember much about the wedding other than getting ready before, pacing in the church hallway, getting walked down the aisle, being photographed, and running around the reception room making sure things were done. My wedding was pretty, and our honeymoon was the more fun that I could have imagined! We’d never been on vacation by ourselves before. Overall, I am proud of planning my own wedding. No one else could have made it how I liked it but me and my husband. It was stressful, but very worth it.

One of our engagement photos

Trying on my dress in the Dorms

Honeymoon Photo

1st Good Experience

Making a Pumpkin Pie from Scratch

It happens to me every year, when fall starts and the weather turns colder and school starts again. It happens to everyone else too, you can tell by the way people react when Starbucks brings out their seasonal flavors. We crave pumpkin. “OMG, pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks, #pumpkinspice,” says everyone on Facebook and Twitter.

Well last year, this happened to me, too. My husband, Trevor, and I were invited to go to the corn maze in Renton with our friend Eli and his family. Subsequently, there was a pumpkin patch and a seasonal fruit and vegetable stand also there. We finished the corn maze and I just had to have a pumpkin. As soon as I saw the pumpkin patch, I called my grandma and my Auntie Gloria to ask them what kind and size of pumpkin is the best for pies. I knew I wanted to make a pumpkin pie from scratch. “No Libby’s canned pumpkin for me, that’s the cheap way!” I thought. I picked and bought the perfect pumpkin, and went home to look up recipes.

When I got home, I found a site that has step-by-step instructions on how to make a pumpkin pie from scratch. Not many people do this; even my grandma had never made a pumpkin pie out of a corn maze pumpkin. So, I got to work. I sent my Trevor to the store to get the ingredients that I needed – ginger, allspice, ground cloves, and pecans. Pecans in pumpkin pie? Online, there was a supplemental recipe for pecan topping on your pumpkin pie. “If I’m going to make a pumpkin pie out of a corn maze pumpkin, why not go all out?” I thought.

First, I prepared to cook the pumpkin. First, I took off the top of the pumpkin and scraped out the guts. I separated the guts from the seeds so that I could later make baked and salted pumpkin seeds, which taste just like french fries. Then, I had to cut the pumpkin into chunks, which was really hard. Pumpkins are naturally hard to cut, especially if they’re not pie pumpkins, they’re crude ones from the corn maze, and you are using a butcher knife. After I had my pumpkin chunks, I baked them in the oven for a long time, until the pumpkin was soft and done. After I scraped out the pumpkin glop, I had to let it drain overnight. This is sometimes typical with pumpkins, but is extra necessary if you don’t buy a pie pumpkin. If you don’t drain it, your pie will be watery and turn out like soup. After I had my thick pumpkin glop, I prepared to make the pie.

I made and baked the crust, with my signature crimped edges that my grandma taught me. Then, I added all the spices, eggs, and milk to my pumpkin glop until I had the perfect pumpkin filling. I filled the crust with the filling, covered the edges of the crust with tin-foil, and baked it. While it was baking, I made the pecan topping. I caramelized sugar on the stovetop and added butter and the pecans. When the pie was done, I topped it with the pecan topping, and it was finished!

I called my grandma immediately. My grandma doesn’t understand why anyone would take the long way. When I was researching making pumpkin pie from scratch, I found out that any canned pumpkin you can buy is actually butternut squash, because it’s illegal to can pureed pumpkin. Its chemical makeup is not USDA approved to can and sell. She never believes me. But she was still proud that I finished. I took a photo of my finished pie, and sent it to the website where I got the recipe, and they chose to use it as the main picture for the page! That made me feel good.

My husband Trevor doesn’t like pumpkin. His family doesn’t have traditional meals for Thanksgiving and Christmas, they eat steak and salmon, so pumpkin isn’t really an ingredient he grew up with. He still had a piece of pie and loved it, though, and he got sick on the pumpkin seeds!

I am proud of myself for making the pie from scratch. I would consider it one of my accomplishments, because baking is something I love to do, and making pumpkin pie from scratch is not something that everyone does.