Why I ended up paying for a study room just to sit in front of a laptop

The sudden pivot to remote testing

I didn’t think I would be spending money on a private space just to talk to a computer screen. When I heard that the recent recruitment process for a company I was eyeing involved an AI-based video interview, I assumed I could just do it from my desk at home. But then I looked at the lighting in my room. It is frankly terrible, with shadows that make me look like a suspect in a documentary. I tried moving my desk around for an hour, but the webcam kept catching the messy stack of books behind me. That is when I realized that if I really wanted to look like a professional candidate, my bedroom wasn’t going to cut it.

Trying to find a quiet place in the city

I started searching for places near Seoul National University Station where I could get a bit of privacy for a few hours. Most of the cafes nearby are packed with students, and the noise level is just too unpredictable for an AI interview that needs to analyze your voice patterns. I ended up booking a small study room. It cost me about 10,000 won for two hours, which felt a bit steep, but the soundproofing was decent and it was clean. It was weird to sit in a room designed for group study all by myself, surrounded by blank white walls and a whiteboard that still had some old math equations on it.

Dealing with the hardware issues

My laptop camera is old, and the quality is grainy. I considered buying a new external video conferencing camera, but the decent ones were around 70,000 to 100,000 won. That felt like too much of a gamble for a single interview. So I just cleaned the lens of my current laptop with a microfiber cloth and hoped for the best. The real annoyance was the software compatibility. The AI interview portal seemed to hate my browser settings. I spent nearly thirty minutes just trying to get the microphone check to pass. By the time I actually started the recording, I was already exhausted, which probably wasn’t the fresh, energetic state I wanted to project to the hiring manager.

The reality of the AI gaze

Looking at the camera lens instead of the person on the screen is harder than it sounds. Every time I looked down at the screen to see if the interface was still working, I felt like I was breaking eye contact with the AI program. It is a strange, cold experience compared to the few in-person interviews I have done in the past. In an office setting, you can at least read the room, look at the interviewer’s tie, or notice if they are scribbling notes. Here, I was just talking to a blinking cursor. I wonder if it really captures my personality, or if it just assigns a number to how steady my voice was and how often I blinked.

The lingering uncertainty of the process

After the recording was uploaded, I didn’t feel a sense of relief. I just felt disconnected. There was no handshake, no ‘thank you for your time’ from a real human, just a ‘submission complete’ pop-up. I walked out of the study room and back onto the street near the station, and it felt like I had just completed a chore rather than a career milestone. I am still not sure if the lighting was right or if my answers sounded robotic because I was too busy staring at the little green light on my laptop. It is done, but the uncertainty of whether I performed well or just looked like a person struggling with bad technology remains.