u/Ecstatic-Wing6278

I'm fortunate to have made it to the final selection round of the grad program for a state government department. 🎉

It's going to be made up of two parts, one individual interview where we get 20 min to prepare a 15 minute presentation answering some questions, and one group activity where we're supposed to work together to produce some kind of response to a prompt.

Honestly never done anything like this, I have no idea what they could possibly ask. 20 min is so long to prepare an individual response it's got to be more than the standard "give an example of a time you had to work under pressure", but also surely isn't any specialised technical question.

Also they've already gotten a statement of intent, a video interview and a written assessment out of me, I'm running out of original stuff to say!

If anyone at all knows anything about this format of interview please let me know 🙏

I'm about to graduate uni, no clue about professional etiquette 🥲 I have a casual job and an internship, both of which I'm about to finish.

I just got a job offer that needed a referee report from my two supervisors, but now I need another report from them as I'm looking to get into a grad program. I'll probably apply to at least three or four. I'm realising APS reference checks are more annoying than private, in that it's not just a phone call but an emailed two page referee report they have to fill out.

I bought both my supervisors gift cards as a preemptive thank you, but is it too much to ask them both to give four or five referee reports within the span of a few months?

If it's asking way too much, I can consider putting other people down on my future applications or maybe being very selective about which programs I apply for. Or maybe I shouldn't be job shopping so hard if I already got to the semi-final hiring stage of one grad program already.

Maybe I'm really overthinking this, but I had a previous manager not respond at all to a reference check and then ghost me when I tried to follow up, sort of costing me a job. So I reallyyy want to keep a good relationship with my current referees.