Meetings, meetings, and more meetings!

Today, the team had their weekly sponsor/advisor meeting in the morning. Many topics were discussed regarding the interview questions that are being formulated to ask the individuals who are completing the survey that the team will be sending out in the next few days. One point that the advisors brought to our attention was that conducting a phone interview has a lot more preparation than it sounds, or than one would think. Personally, I had a few "ah-ha!" moments. As the team is starting to get more in depth of evaluating the DOER's program application process, more and more questions are being raised.

The team was referred to a piece of literature that contains many interview strategies of how to handle different responses from each interviewee. The team predicts that this will be a very helpful guide to phone interview success.

The interview process is actually very complicated, and one of the things the team learned today was that there are many aspects to the interview.

• Starting the actual interview (Preamble)
• Practicing a good amount of Mock interviews
• Being able to ask the right questions in order to get the information you are looking for 
• Stopping an interviewee during a long response to move onto the next question (if time is limited)
• Dealing with responses that are very negative 

Above are just some of the necessary ideas to think of before conducting an interview that were discussed in today's meeting. 
The team found time to meet with Dwayne (The Renewables Division Director). We introduced ourselves individually and started asking questions. Dwayne was very helpful and invited the team to attend the big announcement of the round one winners, which will be held Thursday, September 25th at another site in Boston.