Explain how you handled a situation when you had to make an important ethical decision
Whilst working in Human Resources at the Real Canadian Superstore, as it was local to my high school, I often encountered resumes of people I knew personally. If I had a bad or good impression of them, I had to make the ethical decision as to whether I should use my personal bias opinion to hire them or not. In these instances it was hard not to use this bias towards them as I believe many social and school/ work ethic skills often are transferable to the workplace. In the end, that was not my call to make. It would not be fair to allow my personal opinions get in the way of a professional opportunity. Therefore, I handed these types of cases for my colleague to review, prescreen and interview the candidate, allowing them to have an equal chance at the position as everyone else.
Tell me about a time when you used teamwork skills in one of your classes to work through a problem.
With GBDA being so heavily involved with groupwork there are a lot of classes where teamwork skills need to be utilized. One instance where this occured was in one of our classes in first year where we needed to create a prototype phone application. My team and I had run into an issue where there was a glitch in one of our wireframe pages the day before the project was due to hand in. There was still plenty of work to complete on other design and written aspects of the assignment, so although all of us wanted to concentrate on fixing the one problem, we needed to split off as a team to tackle the project as a whole. I had taken the role and lead in this situation in assigning each person to a specialized task that they had more extensive knowledge in and would therefore be more efficient. We all had to stay up a little later due to the problem we encountered but in the end the project was complete and we recieved results we were very proud of.
Describe a time when you didn't succeed at something you were trying to accomplish
I often like to show that I am an independent worker who is able to accomplish tasks without much instruction or help. I believe it demonstrates initiative, dedication and the skills of a hard worker. Because of this mindset, there was an instance in my film classes in high school which I wanted to include additional creative aspects to my film to enhance my final product but wasn't sure exactly how to do it. Even though I was running low on time, I still attempted to research for myself on Youtube and other video editing forum websites to find the answer myself. Many of the content that I found was much too complicated for my skill level but I was wanting to figure it out on my own. In the end, by the time I had asked my teacher for help, there was a lack of time to actually execute it and therefore I failed to meet the expectations of my vision. I have now realized that asking for help does not mean that you are incapable, but are rather taking iniative to better your learning.
Tell me about a time in a recent school term when you needed to meet several hard-stop deadlines and how you handled it.
Our program like many others is very work intensive, but with a heavier emphasis on assigments rather than studying. Coming from the IB Program, the work load has rarely ever been an issue for me in the past as we constantly had many hard-stop deadlines to meet. Although in this past 2A term, it's been a little more difficult than I'm used to. Recently just after the Thanksgiving weekend where I enjoy spending time with my family, there were assignments and midterms in every single one of my classes. I knew I would find it difficult to juggle the time that I needed to spend on my assignments between the time that I needed to spend with my family. Therefore, I then decided it would be a good idea to start them out slowly one by one, a couple weeks in advance to relieve the stress of that weekend. That iniative helped greatly when it came time for Thanksgiving weekend, but I still needed to prioritize and step away from the family in order to ensure that I completed all my assignments on time.