IAS Interview: Gaining from the experience of the successful IAS Interviewees always helps to boost your morale and face the last stage of the Civil Services Exam with greater poise and confidence. The interactive sessions with the successful candidates give you a better understanding of what UPSC actually aims at making an assessment of during the Interview.
What Is It That Differentiates The Interview From The First Two Stages Of The CSE?
The interview is commonly referred to as the Personality Test. The first two stages of the Civil Services Exam viz., the Prelims and the Mains make an assessment of your knowledge. However, it is knowledge assessed with the perspective of finding the suitable candidates that might be successful Civil Servants if recruited.
Thus, UPSC is not going to make an assessment of your knowledge in order to make you write great books. Neither does UPSC aim at asking you to deliver scholarly lectures to the students of any University. Your knowledge at the first two stages of Prelims and the Mains is assessed simply to make sure whether you are a potential Civil Servant or not.
However, the point to be noted is that UPSC has already made an assessment of your knowledge prior to the Interview. Now the Interview aims at making a thorough assessment of your personality. It is your personality in its complete entirety that is going to present you as a suitable (or other otherwise, depending on your performance in the Interview) candidate as a future Civil Servant.
IAS Interview: How Far Does It Help To Interact With The Successful Interviewees?
Interacting with the successful interviewees gives you a broad idea of the manner you are expected to respond even to the tricky questions during the Interview. It should always be kept in mind that UPSC is going to get a holistic view of your entire personality in the Interview. Needless to say, your personality would be scrutinized. Besides, if you aim at joining the Indian Administrative Services, your personality should represent you as an individual with an alert, aware, and to top it all, an unprejudiced mind.
And listening to the experiences of the successful candidates guides you well to answer even the trickiest of the tricky questions in a logically convincing manner. Your answers convey your ideology, apart from various other traits of your personality as specified earlier. Nobody carrying a biased ideology can administer the society in a manner that is justifiable to all. The same applies to all the Civil Servants joining various cadres offered by UPSC. But these are only the highest of all the rank holders that are asked by UPSC to join the Indian Administrative Services.
And your performance in the Interview can really play a pivotal role to help you score higher than the competition (the Interview carries 275 marks) thus pushing your rank higher than it might have been otherwise. And if you listen to the experiences of the successful candidates, you would be better equipped to do so.
The Interview Experiences of a Few Successful Candidates
As all of the candidates who face the Interview have already cleared the Prelims and the Mains, they are the selected ones out of the multitudes of the lakhs of the Civil Services aspirants who apply for the CSE every year. Yet the point to be noted is that not all the candidates successfully clearing the first two stages clear the last one i.e., the Interview successfully.
Here are the Interview experiences of a few IAS officers to help you gain an idea of the kind of the questions that UPSC asks to make an assessment of a candidate’s personality.
Chandra Mohan Garg, IAS
Chandra Mohan Garg was asked about what had he been doing since the time he gave up his job? And had Neta Ji been alive, what would have taken place in India? Besides, he was asked if he registered with the community project just for the sake of fun or a part time activity.
Bhavesh Mishra, IAS
He was asked if learning languages is a hobby with him, can he pen down his name in Tamil? And can he cite any reasons for Bollywood to supersede Hollywood in the current century?
A Word of Caution – IAS Interview
In sharp contrast with the preparation for the Prelims and the Mains, or for that matter, any of the Exams conducted by any authorities, there are never any set parameters of what can be asked in an Interview, let alone the CSE Interview. But it is always advisable to cultivate a right frame of mind to help you face the Interview with a greater confidence.
At times, many of the students fail in the Interview simply because they take their preparation for the same quite lightly. Or what is worse, they do not realize the urgency to prepare for the Interview at all. They are of the opinion that nobody can ever know what can be asked during the Interview, so why prepare at all?
But interacting with the successful candidates would definitely help you realize that it is far from easy, at times, to answer the tricky questions asked by the UPSC Interview Board. And if you fail to answer in a logically convincing manner, all your effort that you have made to qualify the Prelims and clear the Mains would simply be useless.
Conclusion
IAS Interview: It is your frame of mind that helps you approach the questions during the Interview in the right manner and answer accordingly. Even if you feel that a question has been a tricky one, well it is to assess how would you respond to the same without getting unnerved? And if you do so, it only conveys that you have an alert and aware mind with a critical insight into various situations that might present themselves before you, if UPSC recruits you as a Civil Servant. Remember, the questions asked