The First Interviews

My first interview was at 11am with a firm called McNally Design, which is largely a interiors based firm as I discovered looking at their website. They focus primarily on leisure buildings such as pubs, restaurants and nightclubs. This is a firm that didn’t really seem like it would be the right fit for me, but I still wanted to do my best to land the job in case it happened to be the only firm interested.

To start off, I took the LUAS out to a growing “industrial park” only a few stops south from where I am staying, which was a nice enough area, but soon presented a fairly significant problem: None of the streets were labeled with signs. In Ireland, it is more the standard for street signs to be posted on the walls of buildings at the corner of two streets rather than being shown on a sign at the sidewalk. Unfortunately in this industrial park I found very few buildings that actually had the street names posted. The directions I received from my recruiter on this one were fairly vague, so after 10 minutes of looking I decided to give the company a call to let them know I was having a hard time finding it and see if they could point me in the right direction. They were happy to give me a few directions, which I proceeded to take in exactly the wrong direction…

After a while of wandering, completely lost, I gave the company another call and discovered that I was far from where I was supposed to be. They reassured me that everyone gets lost coming to this place, but that didn’t make me feel better about being late for the meeting. The woman on the phone talked me through walking to their office based on my description of the buildings that were around me. This time the directions were very detailed and I managed to get straight to the building I was supposed to be at a half hour before. When I saw it, I had the sneaking suspicion that I had already walked by it once earlier on, but shook that off and prepared to make up for the folly with pure charm…

The woman I was meeting made me wait a bit, which was only fair since I had made her do the same. When she came in she was very nice, but essentially opened the interview by telling me “I don’t think you’re my guy, but I agreed to see you anyway.” She didn’t put it exactly like that, but that was the gist. Her reasoning was the same as mine in not thinking this was going to be the best fit for me, but I was still determined to win her over.

Because I didn’t have much in the way of interiors experience I focused the discussion more on how the process of design is fairly similar across the board with any creative endeavor and that a good designer could design just about anything given the more finite knowledge of the subject. She was involved in the interview and we had a good discussion, and at the end, she seemed much more interested. I still didn’t expect her to offer me any position, but I felt good about how the interview ended with her considering me at all.

For my second interview with HKR, I made my way back to the LUAS without issue and took the train into city center. The firm was located very near St. Stephen’s Green, in a building that they had redesigned themselves. This was an excellent design, which had me excited from the start (it’s not often that architects really get to work out of a building they design, let alone one that really shows off what they are capable of).

This interview seemed to go very well. I interviewed with one of the company’s directors and he seemed like he would be a great person to work for, great personality and someone I could learn a lot from. His descriptions of how the firm worked sounded like an excellent fit for me, and the whole interview seemed to go off very well. At the end he seemed very interested and this became one of my top picks out of the group of firms that I was interviewing for. (I have yet to hear back from them, so I can’t yet say whether his interest was genuine or not.)

I finished there feeling like I had not come to Ireland for nothing – that there was a firm out there that I could really get something good out of (one of my primary goals for coming to Ireland was to find a really good design environment to work in, and I was seeing this a lot in this particular firm).

I ended the day heading back to the shopping center to do some emailing and chatting and then headed home. This also marked the first night that I ate anything very significant…a piece of pizza… From the flight and my generally unsettled nerves I hadn’t really felt much like eating. At this point though, I decided that the discomfort in my stomach might actually just be extreme hunger and not just stress and indigestion…

The weekend was now ahead of me and I would have time to re-center and take a nice, deep breath.