With all this talk about interviews for the PB3 assignment, it’s actually caused me to cast my mind back a few years.

The year is 2013. Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” is dominating radio airways. Most of my peers are in year 10. But I’m a heavily sleep-deprived, coffee-addicted year 12 student doing whatever I can to try to create a good final product. Which brings me to my first ever interview.

My year 12 product was a sports magazine covering the Melbourne Ice ice hockey team (yay for explanatory redundancy). The feature article was to be on Tommy Powell – one of the teams most long-tenured players at the time. But, Tommy had a pretty busy schedule. After weeks of trying to tee up an interview with Tommy, I then approached another Ice player – Matt Armstrong – to request one with him instead. The interview fell together in the space of about 24 hours, which got me wondering why I hadn’t tried to get an interview with Matt from the start.

I did a little bit of research and, from memory, had something like 15 questions lined up for Matt to answer. I actually managed to find Matt had quite the resume before landing in Melbourne — which actually made him a really good candidate for interviewing. I found once Matt and I got talking — he became incredibly candid in his answers and gave incredible insight. It’s funny though, at the time Matt and I had agreed to meet for something like 45 minutes; and if I’m not mistaken, we ended up talking for nearly double that.

This actually forced me into a position where I had to cut out massive chunks of what we had talked about in order to keep our interview across just the three pages I had allocated for it — but this was almost a preferable position. I learned it was way better to have more to work with than you needed, so you could include the strongest parts and and omit the weakest. What I was left with was a really solid short-bio story to write about Matt’s career.

This experience set me up for later interviews I conducted as part of a short-lived journalism major attempt in my Arts degree, and (hopefully) the interview required for project brief 3.

 

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