Hey everyone, welcome back! This week I will be briefly going over my interviewing prep and experience, while also saying goodbye to this class and this blog.
Internship
During this month, I started my internship as a software engineer intern. It was my first time working as a software engineer and it was a bit daunting. At this point, I hadn’t yet even thought about interview prepping. Luckily, I had a friend that is also in this program that let me know about CodePath’s interview prep course opening up. I applied, took the online assessment and was told I was borderline between intermediate and advanced. I ended up doing intermediate for 2 weeks before switching over to advanced due to the large gap in difficulty.
Burn Out
Midway through the summer and I was feeling pretty burnt out. I had been doing CodePath 3 times a week + the weekly online assessment with a 40-45 hour internship. I started to pay less and less attention toward the end of the courses’ duration and eventually decided that I would need to really put in work to be interview ready.
Interviewing
As September started, so did interview season. This time I felt more confident since I had been covering different pattern types on leetcode and had just finished my internship. I immediately saw the difference in response rates this time around. By the start of October I had about 20 online assessments which 14 landed in first round interviews. As of November, I’ve only had 3 onsite interviews due to my internship’s return offer deadline.
Study Guide
My brief prep study guide: get comfortable with arrays, strings, linked-lists, trees, and graphs. Start on easy difficulty and switch to medium after about 1-2 weeks. Switch topics every 2 weeks. I intentionally did not include dynamic programming problems as I have never gotten one in an interview. Others might have a different experience. After about a month or so, do Pramp mock interviews, so you can get comfortable explaining your thought process. Get your resume ready and let the interview season start for you!
The End
As for this class, the quarter is now coming to an end and with it this blog. I didn’t think I would enjoy writing as much as I did. Not sure how it is related to CS, but for some reason it feels kind of nice doing assignments not directly related to coding. As for the project and my team, I’m glad to have found a couple of teammates that really do their end of the bargain. I’m excited to finish this class strong and start my career after graduating!
