Today I had my first ever..official..career-defining..internship interview. Well, you guessed it, I blew it.
Emotional damage I'm just a year 2 computer engineering student, what else do y'all expect from me. They'll go easy on you they say...start-ups are easy to get in they say. Well yeah, I thought so too...until the first round of my interview ended.
First-round nailed it..I guess. Tell us a little about yourself...why are interested in crypto..what do you think of crypto in the market in the near future..how does crypto work..etc..etc. I've got answers for all of them, knew the answer the night before too. (i couldn't sleep thanks for asking)
"I've learnt some basics on algorithms and data structures this semester but I'm not very good at it yet." After I said this, interviewers must've thought. "Oh no Mr MM, we gon dig deeeeep into it now and you ain't going nowhere until you dug out your last brain cell. Basically at this point, I have officially dug my own grave.
Explain any concepts you've learnt to us like we're the clients. I mean..looking back I should've maybe explained chained hashing instead of that. But guess what.. here's where I really crawl into my grave. "Alright..explain some concepts..that's great..gotta come up with some simple stuff so you don't get asked questions you don't know the answer to..ohh..how about...GOOGLE FOOBAR CHALLENGE LEVEL 3: PREPARE THE BUNNIES' ESCAPE." I mean..out of all the things you could've said, and MM you chose to explain a breadth-first search algo and queue solving a google level 3 question. Readers you're probably thinking this question is easy I can present it under a minute. HEY, I am a year 2 pathetic university low-life who can't mentally calculate 36/4 and (6*7)/2 under 2 seconds, give me a break, and yes they did ask me to mentally calculate math and I couldn't which is really awkward. Well, what happened then? I did explain my solution, they added some complexity to the question like adding time cost between 2 cells and finding the new shortest path from (0,0) to (n-1,m-1). And, I just stood there in silence. ouch...
At this point, it's becoming too awkward for me to continue writing about so I'm just gonna skim through round 3. Gave me a game, roll a dice, 4 players, all four gotta have the same chance of winning(4p got 25% of winning), how will you design the game, GO. Got lost in the beautiful language of English(I'm a Canto from Hong Kong btw), couldn't think straight as I got lost in round 2 already. Game over. They solved it for me.
Am I sad? of course I am. How long will you take to get over it? Already have. When life gives you a lemon, make lemonade. I fell pretty hard today, but at least I know how I fell.
Lesson learnt:
Algorithms and Data structures. bedtime story every day
Work on some side project. comment if you got some interesting projects I can do as a year 2 who barely knows much about algo and ds. pls I need help
Better presentation.
Be careful what concepts you want to bring out. You must be very familiar with it if you want to bring it out.
Work on your math. Stop using a calculator for little calculation
Conclusion: Although i have failed pretty hard in my first ever internship interview, instead of feeling like a loser i felt relieved and eye opening. I know what i am lacking, what i am required, what i must do in order to become a better programmer. I want to pursue a software engineer when i graduate and i intend to keep it that way. It doesn't matter how hard i fell, but what matters are how i fell and get back up. Basic stuff that stuff that everyone knows but only now i get it.
This is my first blog as my journey begins. I am MM. i am a year 2 Computer Engineering student. Tag along if you want to see how i grow to become a top tier programmer from scratch.