Field Interview Paper

This interview took place in Dean Vargas’ office. As a first year advisor in the school of engineering, she has been busy in the past month assisting first year students in picking which type of engineering they are most interested in and helping them to plan their schedules for the upcoming year. This meant that she did not have the time to meet somewhere else. If this were not a factor, I would have suggested meeting in a cafe as that would have caused Dean Vargas to view me less as one of her many students and more as an individual woman, coming to her for assistance in navigating the unique set of circumstance women engineers need to navigate. I believe that as a result of holding the meeting in her office and not in a secondary location, …show more content…
The overall tone of the interview was somewhat distant. She answered the questions in more detail than simple yes or no responses, but the questions were needed to keep the interview going. I came into the interview with certain expectations, such as that it was a quantitatively known fact that women had worse spatial skills as compared with men, but Dean Vargas called this fact into question, citing a student of hers that had done research into the subject, so I eliminated the questions I had on whether or not she thought a class teaching women spatial skills would be helpful because if she did not even grant the premise that women struggled in this area that it was unlikely she would support the class. Looking back, I possibly should have presented her with the studies I had seen and seen if she had new thoughts in light of these, but at the time of the interview, I did not considering the implications of following a more intensive line of questioning when the first answer eliminated the questions I had previously