Job Interviews: What you do

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Be prepared to answer:

What are your values, goals, weaknesses?
What don't you like to do?
What work environment do you NOT like?
What's your passion for life and career?
Describe yourself.

What to do before the interview:

Take deep breaths.
Remember, they want to find the right person; They want you to do well.
Listen, eye contact, sit up straight, enthusiasm, confidence (sound authoritative).

3 Types of Interview

1. Behavior-specific skills (ex: “Tell me about a time where…”).
2. Case-specific problems (ex: “Here is a business case for you to work through.”).
3. Stress (more than one interviewer firing questions, i.e., let's see how you do under stress).

Questions to ask about the company:

Where do you see the company in the next 5 years?
How would you describe the atmosphere here? (formal or informal, etc)
How does the company support work-life balance?
Are things handled differently for in-office and hybrid workers?
How does the company determine salary levels?

Questions to ask about the position:

What was the reason last person left? How long was she in that position?
Why is this position available?
How far along in the interview process am I?
Have there been any changes in the company I should know about—such as layoffs or changes in leadership?
What did you like about the last person in this position?
How many times has it turned over in the last 5 years? (if a lot, ask why)
Who do I report to? Who would work under me?
What are my responsibilities?
Describe a typical day.
Do you have a written job description (get a copy)
What is the potential for promotion?
What is the greatest challenge I will face?
What problems might I face in the job?
How would you describe your management style?
How soon do you hope to make a decision?
Can I take a tour of the facilities?
Do you have any hesitancy in hiring me?

Questions to ask about Benefits:

Health benefits booklet?
holidays and vacations?
Do you have any “employee resource groups” (eg.)?

"Thank you for meeting with me."

More Job Tips

20 Recent Articles about the Impact of AI on Health Care

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Towards autonomous medical artificial intelligence agents – Nature

AI helped diagnose 18 children whose rare diseases had stumped doctors – NBC News  

AI Is Taking Over Hospitals – The Atlantic

How AI is helping fight the latest Ebola outbreak - Semafor

New AI-based medical imaging method can predict the bone to be removed during cochlear implant surgery – SPIE  

Doctors Inject Human Subjects With First Vaccine Designed by AI – Futurism  

AI Model Links Tumor Mutations to Treatment Response - UCSD

HHS Launches Crackdown Using AI to Detect Medicaid Fraud and Waste – Wall Street Journal  

Wearables increasingly look to AI to predict health problems before they happen – Seattle Times  

The Hantavirus Outbreak Is Resurrecting Covid-Era Misinformation Tactics – New York Times  

How AI is making health care even less affordable – Axios  

AI outperforms doctors in Harvard trial of emergency triage diagnoses – The Guardian

Your Doctor Is Using A.I. to Take Notes. What Could Go Wrong? – New York Times

Thinking of using a chatbot for medical advice? Read this first. – Washington Post

Therapists are using AI to take notes. Is it a useful tool or a breach of trust? – NPR  

Artificial intelligence is being used in South Korea to make care calls to older adults who live alone and to fight dementia – New York Times

AI scamming ain’t brain surgery, but even neurosurgeons get fooled - The Hill

Doctors' growing AI deepfakes problem – Axios

How Stanford patients help expose ‘fault lines’ in health AI adoption – Stat

Have a Thorny Medical Question? Your Doctor May Be Using A.I. for That. - New York Times

AI Detection and Evasion

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In some cases, the very same companies selling AI detection tools are also making apps that allow students to cheat, including by writing papers for them or rephrasing text written by others. The head of education at the A.I. company that makes Grammarly calls the race between detection and evasion “ultimately, a dead end.” She urges educators to accept that most future writing would be produced in a partnership between artificial intelligence and human discernment. -New York Times

AI Definitions: Natural Language Processing

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Natural Language Processing - This type of machine learning transfers language into numbers to make it intelligible to machines. The first step is tokenization, where text is divided into word units called tokens. These tokens are then transformed into vectors (lists of numbers). A single word token might be represented by more than 1,000 numbers in a vector. The vector is considered to have a higher dimension when many numbers are used. The meaning is therefore nuanced. A low dimension for a vector means the list of numbers is low. While a low dimension is not as nuanced, it is easier to work with. A deep learning model (typically a transformer model) can use these vectors to understand the meaning of words and determine how the words relate to one another. An example would be “king “relates to “man” while “queen” relates to “woman.”

More AI Definitions

AI Exploiting The Loopholes

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When researchers presented a large language model with 72 simulated regulatory environments, the AI learned to exploit loopholes in everything from credit card rewards programs to school funding formulas, despite never being instructed to do so. The loopholes couldn’t be patched fast enough to keep up with the mischief. In more than 100 iterations of five scenarios, the model kept finding new exploits, each more subtle than the last. And existing safety mechanisms didn’t catch the rule-bending behavior.  -Science.org

Would you be Willing?

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Elizabeth Stokoe, professor of social interaction at Loughborough University, and her colleagues, have analysed thousands of hours of recorded conversations, from customer services to mediation hotlines and police crisis negotiation. They discovered that certain words or phrases have the power to change the course of a conversation.

People who had already responded negatively when asked if they would like to attend mediation seemed to change their minds when the mediator used the phrase, “Would you be willing to come for a meeting?” “As soon as the word ‘willing’ was uttered, people would say: ‘Oh, yes, definitely’ – they would actually interrupt the sentence to agree.” Stokoe found it had the same effect in different settings: with business-to-business cold callers; with doctors trying to persuade people to go to a weight-loss class. She also looked at phrases such as “Would you like to” and “Would you be interested in”. “Sometimes they worked, but ‘willing’ was the one that got people to agree more rapidly and with more enthusiasm.”

Rosie Ifould writing in The Guardian

21 Articles about AI & Religion

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You Can Now Get a Religious Exemption From Using AI at Work – Futurism

AI stumbles on questions of faith – Axios

To Understand Pope Leo’s Efforts on A.I., Look at the Man Shaking His Hand - New York Times

The Vatican is racing to build digital defenses for the AI era - Axios

Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meeting with Christian leaders. – Washington Post

The Atheist and the Machine God - New York Times 

AI stumbles on questions of faith – Axios  

The Catholic Priest Who Helped Write Anthropic’s A.I. Ethics Code – Observer

Unitree robot becomes Japanese Buddhist monk “Buddharoid” – Cybernews

Does AI Have a Place in the Pulpit? – The Dispatch  

AI Use Growing Among Christian Ministry Leaders - Ministry Watch

Vatican releases long-awaited document on AI and Transhumanism – omnes

From churches to chatbots: How AI is fusing with religion – Reuters  

AI Agents Created Their Own Religion, Crustafarianism, On An Agent-Only Social Network – Forbes

Pope Leo warns of dangers of AI, emphasizes dignity of human faces, voices – Catholic Culture

It Makes Sense That People See A.I. as God – New York Times 

Is Transhumanism the Future or Our Downfall? – Psychology Today  

AI ethics in Catholic health – Boston College 

Inside the unlikely Vatican-Anthropic relationship that's reshaping the AI ethics debate – Religious News Service  

Don’t Want to Use AI at Work? Tell Your Boss It Goes Against Your Religion.- Vice

AI Only Responds to the Questions We Know to Ask – Christianity Today

12 Common Job Interview Questions

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› What do you know about our company?

Or, are you a consumer of our product?

The employer hopes to learn:

Did you prepare for this interview? Did you do your homework?

Be ready to offer specifics.

› Why should we consider you for this position?

Or, why do you think you are a good fit for this position?

The employer hopes to learn:

Are you confident in your abilities? What does the company gain by hiring you?

› What are your strengths and weaknesses?

The employer hopes to learn:

Companies expect honesty in answering this question. You should be able to articulate what you are best at and areas you are working to improve.

› What do you want to be doing 5 years from now?

The employer hopes to learn:

Are you goal-directed? Or will you be satisfied with an entry-level position?

› What other job experiences have you had?

The employer hopes to learn:

Have you held a job before? How long have you been working? Did you get along with others?

› What people have been important influences in your life?

The employer hopes to learn:

People who are quick to credit others often work well with others and are not driven by ego. 

› Are you a self-starter?

The employer hopes to learn:

Can you work alone and without direct supervision? If you're not given a task, are you the type of person who takes the initiative to find something to do?

› What are your interests apart from work?

Or, what’s special about you? What do you bring to the job that will help you succeed?

The employer hopes to learn..

Hobbies, activities and other interests indicate that people are well-rounded and can manage their time and work. It’s an opportunity to sell yourself.

› Tell me about a problem you solved recently.

The employer hopes to learn:

Insight into your problem-solving skills.

› Tell me about a goal you recently achieved. What did your initial plan look like? What worked particularly well?

The employer hopes to learn:

Can you talk in detail about a goal you have achieved—where you created your own plan and not only followed those plans but also adapted to circumstances and changing conditions.  

› Tell me about a goal you failed to achieve.

The employer hopes to learn:

If you take responsibility for failing without blaming other people or outside factors. Can you admit you were wrong and that you are willing to change your mind? This will also indicate whether you learned from your experience: can you describe in detail what perspectives, skills, and expertise you gained from that training?   

› How do you handle stress?

More Job Tips

AI Water Use in Context

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In 2023, data centers directly consumed 66 billion liters of water. That number sounds alarming, until you realize that America’s golf courses used almost 2 trillion liters that same year. California’s almond farms use far more than that. At the national level, all data centers combined currently account for less than 0.5 percent of the country’s freshwater use. -The Atlantic

Good intentions are Not Enough

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Movement is not necessarily progress. More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly. Nobody -- remember this -- neither Hitler, nor Lenin, nor any despot you could name, ever came forward with a proposal that read, "Now, let's create a really oppressive and evil society." Hitler said, let's take the means necessary to restore our national pride and civic order. And Lenin said, "Let's take the means necessary to assure a fair distribution of the goods of the world."

In short, it is your responsibility... not just to be zealous in the pursuit of your ideals, but to be sure that your ideals are the right ones. Not merely in their ends, but in their means. That is perhaps the hardest part of being a good human being: Good intentions are not enough. Being a good person begins with being a wise person, then when you follow your conscience, will you be headed in the right direction.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

Commencement Address at Langley High School

June 17, 2010

AI definitions: Moravec’s Paradox

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Moravec’s Paradox - What is hard for humans is easy for machines, and what is easy for humans is hard for machines. For instance, a robot can play chess or hold an object still for hours on end with no problem. Tying a shoelace, catching a ball, or having a conversation is another matter. This is why AI excels at complex tasks like data analysis but also struggles with simple physical interactions, and why developing robots that are effective in the real world will take time and extraordinary technological advances. This paradox is attributed to Hans Moravec, an Austrian who worked at Carnegie Mellon.

More AI definitions

Will AI Liberate Literature?

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When photography was developed in the 19th century, it replaced painting for most utilitarian purposes; a camera could document what things looked like more accurately and cheaply than a painter could. But the art of painting didn’t die out. On the contrary, it entered a golden age: Freed from the obligation of realism, painters developed radical new ways of seeing, such as Impressionism, Cubism, and abstract expressionism. Now AI has the potential to liberate literature in the same way. In a world full of emptily competent prose, we need writers daring, challenging, and obstinate enough to tell us what it’s like to be human, “from the inside.” - Adam Kirsch writing in The Atlantic

Listen Slowly

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Some years back, I was snapping at my wife and children, choking down my food at mealtimes, and feeling irritated at those unexpected interruptions through the day. Before long, things around our house reflected the pattern of my hurry-up style.

After supper one evening, the words of one of our daughters gave me a wake-up call. She wanted to tell me something important that had happened to her at school that day. She hurriedly began, “Daddy-I-wanna-tell-yousomethin’-and-I’ll-tell-you-really-fast.” 

Realizing her frustration, I answered, “Honey, you can tell me . . . and you don’t have to tell me really fast. Say it slowly.” 

I’ll never forget her answer: “Then listen slowly.” 

Charles Swidoll

17 Recent Articles about AI & Academic Research

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27 Freelancing Sites

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