As I’ve discussed in a previous blog post, the timing of when I started this program and how fast I wanted to complete it really put me in a time crunch when it came to getting an internship. Having recently graduated with my first degree in engineering, I knew how vital it was to get an internship. Not only does it give you a feel for the full-time gig once you graduate, it makes you marketable. I remember many of my friends struggling a lot during senior year to get a full-time job for after graduation because they didn’t have internship experience. I felt that this pressure was even more amplified considering I was pivoting to an entirely different industry.
During undergrad, I had a lot of luck getting internships at career conferences. There was one the same month that I began this program, so I signed up. I fixed up my resume and submitted it to the resume database along with my registration. One positive of this happening during a pandemic was that the conference was entirely virtual. I didn’t have to fly to the location, I didn’t have to wait in long lines to talk to recruiters, and I could do it all from the comfort of my home.
A few weeks after I registered, I started getting emails from recruiters talking about setting up phone screens. I was overjoyed! I knew not to get ahead of myself, though. Many of my friends are software engineers, and I witnessed firsthand the arduous interview processes they had to undergo in search of jobs. Even before I applied to the conference, I had began studying data structures and algorithms. I was leetcoding for hours a day and cramming as much information as I could about system design, OOP, and RESTful API’s. I knew I was woefully underprepared, but I had to give it a shot.
The first few phone screens went over no problem! They mostly asked about my resume and asked some behavioral questions. There were some blunders here and there when they asked some more in depth technical questions. Needless to say, I did not get to the next round on those, but I shrugged them off. After the onslaught of phone screens, I successfully nabbed myself seven interviews all in the same week! I had the weekend to prepare for the onslaught of interviews, and I studied arguably harder than I ever had before. Come Monday, I had my first interview over VC where I had to use an online IDE to code the solution to a problem. That might’ve been the most embarrassing experience of my life. It pains me to even think about it considering how far I’ve come, but the first question right off the bat that they asked me was to code the Fibonacci sequence recursively. An absolute toss up some would say!
I couldn’t do it.
I struggled so hard that I could see the pain in my interviewer’s face. He switched over to asking questions about RESTful API design. I blanked. I couldn’t answer a single question. At that point, I basically told the interviewer that I would save him some time and just not continue with the rest of the interview since I knew there was no way I was moving on. The move may have seemed brash, but I had scheduled this to be my first interview of the week because I didn’t care much for the company/position and decided I could take the loss. It was going to be my warm up. I had six more interviews, anyway; surely, I’d get at least one of them!
I finished the week without moving on to the final round with any of the positions. It was heartbreaking. The only solace I could take was that I had gained useful interviewing experience and that by the later interviews I was actually able to answer more of the questions. I know I had only been studying computer science a month at that point, but I still shudder thinking back to that entire week. I would get interviews here and there in the coming months, where I’d do better each time. I would even start moving on to the final rounds, but I would still bomb those too. My saving grace would eventually come but not before I had to have my trial by fire, my interview hell.
