This company held its internship drive during September and in the Job description, it was mentioned to put more emphasis on CS Fundamentals and Web Development. I prepared it accordingly and utilized my time in excelling my technical skills in coding segments of OOPs and SQL. Then the day came when I was having my first-ever interview. The day was very hectic and full of nervousness for me. I had many thoughts in my mind such as what if he asked me the most difficult DSA problems, what if I got blank during answering anything? I calmed myself down and finally my turn came and I tried to present my best version in front of the interviewer. But I guess due to all those overthinking sessions, my internet sucked out and ditched me for 5-10 minutes. However, I regained it and sought pardon from the interviewer and there began my interview.
Firstly they directly asked me about my interest in tech stacks. I quickly presented all those in which I was most confident since I came to know that my interviewer was not going to ask anything from my resume as he was more interested to know what I spoke up about first. Then from OOPS he asked me about method overriding and asked me to code it then from both aspects I had to run the code using virtual keyword and tell him the differences occurring. After the code writing, he began asking some theoretical questions related to Inheritance, which I answered everything confidently. The only question that I had no idea about was the use of Super Keyword in OOPS.
Then he gave me a normal coding question, in which a fixed array was given to me and I had to shift the elements twice to the right side. Since I was nervous, I took around 4-5 minutes to think of the best ideal approach. I used the reverse function to get to the desired output, since the input was fixed, I didn’t ask for any constraints and let the interviewer show the code by running it properly on my IDE.
At last, he gave me a logical question when I was given two water jugs, one measuring 5L and the other one 3L and an unlimited water supply how can we get a total of 4L? (We don’t have any measuring containers or equipment). This question also took me around 5-8 minutes to get the ideal approach. However, during the solving phase, I tried to get the interviewer involved with me while solving.
At last, he asked me “Do you have any questions for us?”, I immediately asked him what all the things I needed to adopt if I got selected, and then I came to know many more things about the company’s work culture. After the interview, I was very confident, since it went well. But luck matters a lot during such times and yeah I was not shortlisted for further HR rounds. But I will remember this interview forever in terms of marking all the mistakes I made and the kind of approach I adopted while solving every problem asked. Maybe in future, I will amend all soft skills to what suits the interviewer most. Till then let’s keep hustling.