First Israeli Job Interview

There are a ton of firsts for new Olim, and today I had my first Israeli job interview. It went well for the most part; well besides the fact that I was 30 minutes late, but I called to let them know, and it didn't appear to be a huge problem. In my defense I would have been on time had the Egged driver not taken an unnecessary detour through Ramat Gan, aka he had no idea where he was going. Still, I arrived and had my interview. For the most part it went well, everyone was very pleasant. Definitely one of the least stressful job interviews I've had in my time which surprised me. I figured a job interview in my second language would prove challenging, and I expected lots of personal questions, but everything went well. I know that's a little bland, but I don't want to write anything too spicy in case I'm hired and start working for this company ;-).

On my way to the interview I read the Jerusalem Post, an Israeli newspaper geared towards people whose Hebrew isn't great. It felt great reading the paper because I can already notice an increase in my reading speed. I'm noticing that as my decoding improves, a new issue that I'll need to tackle is my reading comprehension. It seems that I'm working so hard at reading the words that I forget what I'm reading. Baby steps right, but I must say as an educator and someone who taught decoding and reading comprehension last summer, it's fascinating to see the difficulties of learning to read and write. It's like I'm a little kid in a 6'1 (sorry 1.85 m) medium-build body. I wonder if my fellow Olim feel the same way. Either way, it's a great feeling to see you're own personal progress with the language, and I hope that in the coming months I'll continue to see improvements in all aspects of my Hebrew. To my fellow Olim, make sure you take a break from the frustration, and take a minute to evaluate your own personal strides with Hebrew. It feels great to see how far we've come in nearly four months :-)