Mock Interview

In addition to hosting office hours, our Google Engineers on course staff will provide free mock interviews to you based on the material that you’ve learned in the class and the requirements of the STEP internship.

What are real interviews like? Advice and Tips/Tricks?

Watch this video talk given by Marc Cohen at Howard this semester. You can find the slides here.

What will the mock interviews be like?

The goal of the interviews is to simulate what real technical interviews may be like with various companies, so you can better understand what to expect. The goal of these interviews specifically is not to teach you brand new content (e.g. a question requires a data structure but you’ve never heard of it before), so please tell your mock interviewer if they are asking you something you haven’t learned yet.

Your interviewer will come prepared with a question (or maybe a few, depending on question difficulty). Don’t be afraid to ask clarifying questions - the interview should feel more like a conversation and less like an interrogation. If something is confusing, talk through it with your interviewer and they can help push you in the right direction.

Afterwards, your interviewer will provide you with feedback as well as tips on how to improve your interviewing skills.

What are some good resources to help you prepare?

Review content learned in class
CodingBat Practice Problems has good warmup problems to practice with
Cracking the Coding Interview is a solid book to learn or review core CS concepts and how to use them in interviews. For freshmen, this book is a bit too advanced - but as you take CS1 and CS2, you should start practicing from this book.
LeetCode and HackerRank have tons of practice questions with automatic testing
Recommendations from Students: CodeSignal, CodeWars
InterviewCake: Sign up for the free weekly emails, don’t pay!

Mock Interviews with CSCI100 Google TAs

Use the button below to sign up for a mock interview slot with one of the Google TAs. Click on one of the empty appointment slots and click save to book it. You may as many interviews as you’d like for the remainder of the semester, just please book with a new person each time (as each interviewer likely has only one question they ask). Please watch this video talk on how to interview before your mock interview to get the most out of the mock interview experience.

Schedule a Mock Interview

If after one mock interview you want further experience, consider spending 2-3 weeks working on practice problems and then schedule a second session with a different interviewer.

Mock Interviews with Karat

The Brilliant Black Minds program from Karat offers students access to 4 free practice interviews with their expert engineers as well as supplemental programming such as workshops and office hours. The program is open this semester to any HBCU computer science student. Read more about it here.

Career Info

Here’s a playlist of the career talks given this semester, which cover UX Design, Data Analyst, Product Management roles, and more.

Internship Opportunities for Freshmen/Sophomores

There are a lot of opportunities for technology internships designed specifically for freshmen! Even if you don’t have much programming experience, you should definitely apply. You also shouldn’t limit yourself to freshman programs because you are eligible to apply for most internships open to undergraduates.

Creating a resume

You can use creddle.io for free resume templates!

You can also reach out to Nathan Lupstein, the Google recruiter for Howard, for help with creating a resume or reviewing the resume that you’ve created. His email is nlupstein@google.com.