Internship Hunt – Part 2

In my last blog post, I described part 1 of my internship journey which included some key takeaways from my interview experience. I’ll like to review a resource that really helped me improve my interview game in today’s blog post.

CodePath – Technical Interview Prep

CodePath offers a number of free courses for students on different topics such as cybersecurity and programming fundamentals. Technical Interview Prep is their most popular course. This 12 week course is offered each fall and summer, and has two sessions – one for intermediate learners and another for advanced learners.

I joined the intermediate class during Fall 2021 and found it very helpful in preparing for interviews. Each class covers different types of problems (e.g. strings, lists, binary trees, etc.). Here are some things I enjoyed about the course:

The course is held online over Zoom. Since the classes are synchronous, I had to complete my homework and learn the prerequisite material before each class. This helped me have a consistent study schedule to practice problems each week.

Instructors teach the material in the first half of the course. In the second half, we are placed into a preassigned group where we work on problems together. It was great working on coding challenges together with my group and learning how others would approach a problem.

Throughout the term, there were 2-3 classes that featured guest speakers such as technical recruiters and experienced software engineers that provided tips on the job hunt.

The course taught me about the UMPRE interview strategy. When presented with a problem, I use to immediately start coding a potential solution without planning ahead. The UMPIRE method is a great way to organize your thoughts and also gives you a chance to discuss your approach with the interviewer.

Honorable Mentions

Cracking the Coding Interview (CTCI) – The book is highly recommended among software developers. I referred to CTCI when I needed additional practice on certain concepts. This book covers the technical interview process, various programming topics, and also provides some coding problems and their solutions in Java.

Glassdoor – If you have an interview coming up, you may want to check if the organization has a page on Glassdoor. If you’re lucky, the organization’s Glassdoor page will have some reviews on the interview process including questions and tips. This is a great resource to review potential behavioral and technical interview questions that you may be asked.

This wraps up my blog post on resources that I found helpful in preparing me for technical interviews. Although I have a long way to go until I’m confident in solving Leetcode style questions, practices make perfect! Let me know in the comments below if you have any tips and tricks for getting better at interviewing!