My first interview was on Monday Oct. 28th at 9:00 am. It just happened that all three of my interviewers so far were Indians. Although I am typically languid in the morning and am not much a coffee drinker plus I went to bed quite late the night before, the excitement or maybe anxiety for this first interview fired me up. While I was waiting in the lobby, I browsed latest news related to Microsoft on my smartphone. At 8: 55 am, I pulled out my navy blue resume pad with silver UCLA insignia on the cover and decided to get warmed up with talking about my experiences. Once my interviewer picked me up, the first observation I had was that he walked super super fast and I was almost running after him. That was true for my other two interviewers later on as well. Perhaps they wished to save time so that the most of it could be spent on problem solving. But I reckoned it as more of a reflection of their shuffling pace at Microsoft.
Maybe I should mention how I got the interview in the first place. There was an two-day engineering career fair at my college and Microsoft came on the second. I chatted with one of the representatives from Microsoft and left him my resume. I expressed that I am interested in an SDE internship but also open to PM and the Explorer Program (I am a sophomore). He suggested in honesty that I would have a better shot at the Explorer Program but he could forward my resume to the SDE recruiter first and go from there. Then, I went home and applied online that night as the representative told me. I got an interview request the next day in my email. New to this process, I was very impressed and extremely excited. The only internship interview experience I had had was an intake with Northrop Grumman on the first day of career fair after it closed. They called me right after the fair that day and asked if I could come to the career center in an hour. I wasn’t exactly prepared for an interview, but they told me it was just a chitchat.I met with their head college recruiter and talked extensively about my resume and answered some behavioral questions such as how I worked with other people in a team environment when we had different opinions. It turned out that it was actually my on-campus interview. I guess the moral of that story is always be prepared. Coincidentally, Microsoft interviewed me in the same room, one little detail which made a nice, warm start for me.
After a standard inquisition of my projects and activities in the resume, we moved to the problem solving part. First, he asked me to write a program that returns the angle between hour and minute hands of an analogue clock. He left the room after he gave me the question, which I found kind of nice because I could think about how to solve the problem more relaxed. Thanks to all the maths I had learned, I quickly figured it out, which eased my first-time twitchiness. After I showed him my algorithm, he modified the question a little, adding the second hand as well. The logic is pretty much the same. He approved my approach and then asked me to code. I wrote the function in C++ and that was the end since it was only a thirty minute interview. I got to ask him a couple of questions but not all my questions because we ran out of time. I have to admit that even though I was introduced to computer science a little over a year ago, that question was still unexpectedly easy for me, more about maths than coding skill. Just before I wrote this post, I found a version of that question in ‘Cracking the Code Interview.’
I assumed there was a good chance that I have passed the first round since I managed to solve the problem. However, I waited anxiously for a day but still haven’t heard anything back and I knew that the second round of on-campus interviews would be on Thursday and Friday of the same week. A tip I gathered is to write follow-up emails because both times when I was wondering if I passed or not, I heard back the day after I sent an email and both times have been good news. Hope the trend propagates lol.
I will wrote about my second interview in the next post.
Anybody Anything 