Alex Evans, Borjan Hristovski & …, 8A
As a part of our CAS project, Alex, Borjan and I thought that it would be a great idea to interview a representative from the biggest bird-protection organisation in Poland, Ogólnopolskie Towarzystwo Ochrony Ptaków (OTOP). This article is going to talk about problems which we faced in preparing the interview, such as getting in contact with OTOP, successes which we accomplished as part of this action, our opinions on how it all ended up, a short reflection from our side, and a few elements from the interview itself.
After contacting OTOP and setting everything up, we got the email address of the person we would be interviewing. His name was Łukasz Wardecki and there are a lot of ways that I could describe his character, but, in short, he was cooperative, always kind, and keen to help. After a bit of back and forth with him, we set up a place and time and sent over a set of eight questions which we were planning to ask during the interview. Although at this point everything seemed like it was going to be smooth sailing all the way, we did face one major setback: we emailed Mr Wardecki the questions somewhere around mid-January and we never got any response. Although we do suspect it was an error on our end (we think we might have accidentally messed up their email address), we aren't 100% sure what happened. Thankfully, when we emailed them the second time, he and other OTOP representatives were extremely co-operative and everything went on without a hitch.
These are the 8 questions that we initially sent to Mr. Wardecki:
1) What do you do while working?
2) When was your organization founded?
3) How do you and the Otop organization help birds?
4) How often do you take action to help them?
5) What is working in the field like?
6) What are the biggest challenges in your job?
7) Apart from hanging bird feeders, what can people do to help the birds?
8) Does your organization have any projects planned for this year?
The day of the interview I remember one of us saying that the whole thing shouldn't take more than 15 minutes and that we would be out there in no time. We couldn't have been more wrong. Once we had sat down and set everything up, we started asking away question after question. Mr. Wardecki was incredibly well-prepared, which, for some reason, was a complete surprise to us. During the interview we asked all the extra questions that we could think of and, just like the initial eight questions, he answered them perfectly. What was meant to be a 12-minute interview turned into a 40-minute one. After we had finished, we were offered a tour of their office, where we got to meet most of the team working there, and to see the different sectors of their jobs and what everyone had to contribute to keep the place up and running. Before leaving, we received two copies of a book published by the organisation, a t-shirt and a mug with the OTOP branding for each of us. All in all, I think the whole thing took us about one and a half hours. I remember one of us remarking once we had left on how well Mr. Wardecki was prepared and how well he answered the questions which we didn't provide to him.
To quickly sum up, in our opinions everything went like clockwork, and, after the initial confusion, not once did we have any problems with communication. We weren’t disregarded as some random kids who just came to interview someone, which we expected to happen. We are extremely grateful to everyone who helped us from the OTOP team.
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