Hey!
I got the opportunity to interview for Google STEP Intern for the 2022 Summer during my 4th Semester of B.Tech. I appeared in a total of 3 technical interviews each of 45 mins. All eliminatory in nature.
In general, Google takes 2 interviews for the STEP internship but in my case, my 2nd interview didn’t go so well, so after consideration and review I got a 3rd chance interview after 2 months and that led to my selection in Google. STEP internship was the best experience I have had so far.
Interview: STEP Internship Interview is for 2nd-year students and the topics they focus on are firstly strong basics of DSA such as Sorting, Searching, String Algorithms, using HashMaps, Stacks, Queues, and apart from this do expect a question on topics like BFS/DFS, Topological Sorting, Path Finding questions and questions involving graph algorithm in a 2D Matrix. These were the common topics they asked questions about in the STEP Interview. The difficulty level of questions is mostly medium and some hard level from Leetcode/GFG. Candidates are expected to be thorough with analyzing algorithms and taking edge cases into consideration.
During my review after 2nd Interview, I was informed to pay extra attention to edge cases and space complexity. You are expected to come up with an optimized solution and then write its code on the shared Google Doc and perform a dry run if time permits.
The interviewer can also ask you to write two different solutions for the same question, I was asked to optimize an array question on the basis of time and space both and write two codes for it.
Some tips:
- STEP Internship process starts at the end of November, so start practicing DSA on GFG and Leetcode as soon as you are in the 3rd Semester of B.Tech.
- In google interviews, they rarely ask about any other concept apart from DSA.
- Get confident in basic concepts and using data structures properly so that you can explain why you used this particular solution. Be regular in google coding competitions as I found those questions really helpful, especially KickStart and CodeJam.
- Be confident to speak up your mind and if you’re changing your approach clarify it to the interviewer, it’s your job to make the interviewer understand what you are thinking and where exactly this solution will lead.
- This helped me in my 1st interview, where even if I wasn’t able to code the whole solution due to time constraint, the interviewer was satisfied with the explanation and I advanced to the 2nd round.
- STEP Internship is really a golden opportunity to land into Google in 2nd year only. Sharing my experiences so that more students come to know about it.