- Sep 9, 2024
- 1,032
- 1,810
Just to quickly come in to add to the many amazing responses from other forum members:
Firstly, on the accent bit: I completely relate to your anxiety about it, as this is something I used to worry about a lot as a non-native speak with a quite noticeable Eastern European accent. I remember thinking that I should try to sound more British, but every time I did that I would lose some valuable focus and my responses would end up looking substantially less nuanced and articulated. As such, in my ACs I decided to take a risk and assume partners will care more about the substance of my performance and my abilities rather than how much my appearance fitted what I saw as being a desirable "type" of candidate. This ended up working very well, and while this may have to do with some degree of luck in the particular firms and particular partners I interviewed with, my impression is that this is the rule rather the exception in terms of recruitment attitudes at top firms nowadays.
Secondly, on managing imposter syndrome and being confident: This is once again something I struggled with. Having being rejected in every single application I made the prior year, and also having attended many firm events where I felt somewhat out of place, I had this underlying anxiety that I was not the super-successful and naturally confident type that I thought firms were looking for. As before, I found out that in practice, firms were not really looking for this model of a candidate as much as I envisaged. Particularly in my VSs, I actually noticed that the very outspoken and self-assured candidates tended to convert less often than the quieter candidates - potentially because this attitude can come with a serious risk of being perceived as overconfident and potentially arrogant, features that firms are very weary of. Thus, the first thing I want to tell you is that apparent confidence many not be as important for success as you imagine.
Now, that being said, a healthy degree of confidence in your abilities is of course helpful to prevent anxiety from negatively impacting your performance. To do that, for me it was very helpful to remind myself of the following two things and to aim to internalise them in the days/weeks before the AC:
- You have been selected by competent recruiters as being one of the very best candidates in a huge pool of talent. While you may not believe in your own abilities that much, the concrete proof that a reliable source of authority on the matter considered you to be a great candidate should convince you that is the case.
- In the AC itself, you do not need to outshine others and demonstrate some exceptional brilliance or skill - all you need to do is to ensure you manage each task and question well and avoid scoring badly on any assessment criterion. In my experience, being overly concerned with impressing everyone is what leads candidates to major oversights and thus significantly decreases their success chances. As such, I would advise you to take off the pressure of being exceptional and simply focus on doing well; if you manage that, you will have high chances of succeeding.
