I interviewed with Ascend multiple times. Two years ago, I was applying for a network position. It was a chaotic experience, where the reviewer was astounded at my resume and could not believe my experience. To get to the second interview took months because they were dealing with a HR restructure. I ended up pulling my candidacy because they kept on canceling my interviews. In over a decade of working at NYC schools across public, charter, and private, I have never not had a chaotic experience with admin and management, so I decided to take another swing at it. My friend had worked for the network and stated that they were organized, but it was still chaos, so I sort of knew what I getting into. This time I applied for a network position for managing counselor, that seemed to disappear in two weeks of applying, so I applied in the end of May to the counselor position and got a phone call stating that I was pushed to the final interview in beginning of June. They had me complete prework, but I did not have to submit it, I just needed it for the interview. The prework is doing an at-home assignment (Part 1: Data Analysis & Intervention Planning/ Part 2: Stake Holder Communication & Action Planning/Part 3: Professional Growth). The final interview was three interviews broken up in an hour, 20 minutes each. The process was both organized and disorganized at the same time. They seemed now to have the systematic part of reviewing resumes and scheduling interviews, but they did not have the organization to talk to one another as an interviewing team and see who was going to ask what specific questions. Interview #1 and interview #2 had the exact same questions, even though I questioned the interviewers if they were in fact focusing on different sections of the pre-work. The interviewers were nice, but really pressed for time because they had to ask specific questions and focused solely on the pre-work and then type my response on their computer and did not have time for me to ask questions or ask the typical interviews questions. They were also interviewing multiple interviewees in the same manner in small rooms, so if felt very procedural and factory like. Being in many different hiring committees, I can get why they structure it as such to be more organized. But I did not feel like it was a conversation, but more of them just wanting to know your process for dealing with a disgruntled teacher who does not feel support with administration and the counseling process, and how you manage data and use it to change interventions. No questions specifically about my relationship with students, my experience counseling. This led me to think about how their biggest problem as a network might be teacher support, if everything is focused on that. To me, consultation with teachers is important, but not the main focus of being a school counselor. Students first. They did not talk about the specific school setting I might work in, it was very generalized. This made me feel like I was very generalized and just explaining theoretical school counseling processes with evidence of my actual school experience doing said processes this school year and the year previously.