The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

I had my first DoD interview with a facility last week. I felt pretty good going in. I wanted to stress my excitement for mech engineering and the facility in general. I answered their questions really well. I have a lot of teamwork/leadership experience and practiced my responses to those questions before hand. It wasn’t rehearsed. But I just practiced some general points I wanted to make.
Anyway, I felt like it did not go as well as I would have liked. There was one engineer who lead things off. She basically asked cookie cutter questions and followed a set script. There was a panel of 4 other engineers who had a chance to ask me questions. However, it did not seem like they were very interested in me. I tried to make conversation with my questions but everything was very dry and scripted. Could anyone give their opinion on if this is a bad sign or me just overthinking? Thanks.

I personally think you may be overthinking this, just going off of knowing many people who have been on the interviewer side of things. The people interviewing you may or may not have previous interviewer experience and interviewing people can be almost as stressful/awkward as being interviewed. You seem like you were well prepared and you clearly have an impressive enough resume that they decided to interview you in the first place. So keep that in mind and good luck!