While waiting for 2 months for my interview results, I kept on finding reasons if and why my interview would be rejected. And then it happened, I got rejected.
Looking at myself at a 3rd person point of view, I can see myself as someone whose very passionate in Japanese culture, always has been since I was a kid, took many Japanese and culture classes starting in college to University. Always been wanting to get involved being and working with the Japanese community and I even have started to, at least online.
But as for the interview, since it was an interview of a lifetime, I knew the stakes were high, I was more nervous than I thought, my flow of speech was like going fast and then braking fast. It wasn't smooth, and my responses were too "rehearsed", I memorized my SOP too much and said things exactly as they were worded on the SOP.
For the good things; I do have experience in teaching kids for many years while not being an actual teacher, so I understand what it's like being in the kid's shoes. I expressed a lot of interest and my progress on learning the Japanese language and getting to understand their culture through the internet.
Another weakness I knew I did was I was too focused more on me getting to 'fit' more into the country and community. What I wanted to do after JET, my goals and ambitions, I focused too much on want I wanted, but not what I wanted to "give back".
I didn't do much research on what Japanese kids would be interested in learning about American culture. Or what Japanese people would find fascinating from USA, there wasn't much "cultural exchange" in my interview. There was a lot of cultural exchange when I did language exchange though, but at the time of the interview, I couldn't think of anything to speak of.
In conclusion I felt like I rushed in too fast into all of this, and with all the extra time I had before my interview, I put more into what they're asking for rather than genuine answers from me. And I didn't explore enough into cultural exchange, perhaps I need to connect with my online japanese community more, and become more fluent in Japanese to better communicate more.
Those of you who also got rejected, what are you doing to plan for next application in 2027?
by ConsiderationLeast41