Blog Post #7

In the last class, we were asked to interview another classmate for about 7 minutes. The topic of discussion was Valentine's Day! Before jumping into the interview, we had talked about some ways to "break the ice". Being that I had never spoken to my partner, Nagerrah, I thought I'd incorporate some of the points given in class. With that being said, I decided that my opening questions would be asking her where she was from and how old she was. I quickly mapped out a few other questions in reference to V-day:

• What did you do this past Valentine's Day?
• What were your thoughts on V-day growing up?
• How do you feel about it now that you're older?

One thing I noticed right away, was that my "ice-breaker" question in the beginning, asking  her where she was from, was kind of irrelevant. Although I think it's a good tactic, in this particular discussion, I don't think it played well into what we were talking about and left me kind of jumping from her hometown to what she did on Valentine's day without a smoother transition. One didn't really have anything to do with the other and I realized that I could've came up with another type of question that would set the mood for what we were talking about better. I think next time, I will just go with the flow on a question to break the ice with something pertaining to the subject a bit more. As the interview progressed and I got into my core questions, I didn't really feel much tension between us. I think Nagerrah and I had a good chemistry although we had never met, which was a big plus because that put us at ease a bit more. Our interview was definitely on the conversational side, I feel it got that way when she started to bring up points that helped me to create questions in my head that I hadn't wrote down before. For example, when she told me she went shopping with her aunts and cousins, I automatically thought to ask her if their shopping trip was in tribute of Valentines Day. That wasn't something I was planning to ask, but it made sense to add that in. After that I thought i'd get some of her thoughts about V-day growing up. It was during this answer that I felt our interview really shift into conversation mode! She talked about how she was always excited to hand out Valentines to the class as a kid. This was great because I was then able to relate to my interviewee, I felt this helped the flow of conversation because of that "me too!" moment where we both briefly shared our similarities as kids. My last question was how her view on V-day has changed from her youth, and naturally it is a lot different than being excited to hand out valentines to the class. Although I personally felt it was a good "'ender" kind of question, I noticed we hadn't reached 7 minutes yet! This is when I realized I got stuck. I was stuck because I looked at my paper and my questions were over, and I couldn't come up with another one on a whim because that last question ended things for us. Overall, I thought it was a really cool experience. I never interviewed someone before and now I think I have a better feel for it and what to improve on and what to leave out. I think instead of writing down a bunch of questions to go by I can add in idea bubbles too. This way, when I reach the end of my list, I have some ideas on where I'd like the convo to go and can randomly form questions from that instead of feeling cut off.