It’s that time of year again…. recruiting season! (insert please clap meme) With being a new CS major, this time it’s really different trying to find a job since so much has changed but NSBE has been able to help me through it.
Applying for jobs in CS is no easy task. Not only is there the usual set of behavioral questions about your work experience and the typical “what are your strengths/weaknesses” or “tell us about a challenge you faced,” but there’s also a technical aspect of it. For almost every job, I’ve had to solve a problem in code in a set amount of time and submit my solution for recruiters to review. Essentially, it’s a mini-test for each job that can take from 30 min to an hour. Sometimes the questions are boring but others are a good challenge (I would tell you but I’ve been sworn to secrecy by Big Tech). Ideally, you’d do a ton of studying and it takes so much time to prepare, but NSBE actually helped me with that last week.
Last week, a company named Salesforce, who hires CS students for internships, came to our NSBE meeting this week and did a presentation about HackerRank. Essentially, the goal was for us to understand HackerRank, the online platform where you submit code for certain jobs, and how to best tackle solving these problems under time pressure. It was definitely a worth wild experience because learning how interviewers expect you to solve these problems gave me insight on not only how to do well in the interview, but also how to think about designing my code better, which never hurts.
As an added bonus is, this week I used that very same knowledge in my Microsoft interview where I got asked about a data structure, so I can safely say NSBE had perfect timing and saved me when I needed it the most.
