Welcome back folks! This week I will be discussing my experience preparing for interviews for companies at intern level and next week I will discuss the same for new grad positions. This post will be short but sweet and I hope someone reading this will be able to both relate and learn from my mistakes!
Intern Path
It was January 2020 when I decided that I was going to stop making excuses for not applying to positions. Truth is, I was fearful of looking dumb in front of an interviewer with the little programming knowledge I had (started Fall 2019). I decided to make a plan. I would apply to positions and try out this website called Hackerrank. I would also continue to read the plethora of posts on Reddit about people’s journey towards being interview ready.
Blind
By the time summer 2020 came around, I had done a couple of interviews (failed) but most importantly I felt confident in my plan. Starting June 2020, I was taking CS325 (algos) and working on side projects that I could put on my resume (to get interview screeners like an online assessment). Fast forwarding to August 2020, I had completed 2 full-stack projects and decided to start really getting into my algorithms practice. I started by doing Leetcode problems at the easy difficulty level but then progressed into mediums and found Blind’s top 75 leetcode questions. This is like the holy grail of problems that allow you to get comfortable with pattern recognition. Plus, they get reused pretty often in interviews. In tandem, I also started sending out applications. I made sure that for large companies, I would reach out to friends for referrals.
Interviews
By October, I had studied arrays, strings, trees, and graphs. Overall, I was pretty confident about my programming ability. Luckily my strategy had worked and I had about 3-5 interviews per week consistently for about 5 weeks. My application to interview ratio was about 1:14, so for every 14 applications I was getting an interview. However in these interviews, I didn’t know that for large tech companies there was an initial question then follow up questions. For me, the follow up questions included concepts from OS and distributed computing. I was exposed. I had not taken those courses yet and when I mentioned it to interviewers, it usually resulted in a rejection. It actually wasn’t until I interviewed with Goldman Sachs that I decided to tell them straight up that I had not taken those courses so I had no idea how to respond. Interestingly enough, I received an offer from them! Goes to show that honesty is often more valuable than raw knowledge.
The End
Anyways, I kept interviewing and kept my programming skills up by continuing to do Leetcode problems. I also saw that a weak point of mine was walking my interviewer through my thought process as it is pretty sporadic sometimes. I decided to do Pramp interview sessions so I could be more comfortable explaining things. This helped me out way more than coding in silence! I went from landing 2 onsites up to that point to landing 6 onsites afterwards.
Conclusion
I ended my interviewing season on November 1st when I received my last internship offer. I decided to go with the offer I received last and have not regretted my decision or my preparation strategy! I hope anyone reading this can relate/learn!
