| title | permalink | weight |
|---|---|---|
About |
/about/ |
1 |
A college education at the University of Georgia prepares you for a wide variety of challenges in the professional world but one: failure. In the Computer Science program, many students get their first taste of failure when they are rejected during an internship or full-time job search. While job interviews are never a pleasant business, software companies make this process particularly daunting by requiring timed coding tests to filter an increasingly competitive pool of applicants. Imagine your worst job interview. Now add a math problem that must be solved using an algorithm and then converted into code while the clock is ticking. This scenario may sound excessive, but this has become the norm for many companies and students are struggling to keep up. A person can excel in their Computer Science curriculum and code regularly but these problems often take repeated practice (similar to studying for the SAT) to improve their success rate.
In Fall of 2018, a group of CS students at UGA decided to answer this dilemma by founding Computer Science Interview Prep (or CSIP for short). CSIP provides a means for the UGA community to practice technical interviews as commonly encountered during interviews for computer science / software engineering related careers. To achieve this, we share useful resources including practice problems and mock interviews designed to simulate a real encounter. We also provide resume review every meeting in which the officers will proof-read and give formatting advice.
During a regular session, we present two problems – an easier problem and a harder one. Often these problems are from real interviews that we have found online or taken ourselves. Once we begin, we split members into groups of two and we recommend they pair up with someone they don't know to replicate the awkwardness that someone might feel with a random interviewer. We put a timer up on the projector and the groups attempt to code up an answer before the time runs out. When the time is up, we ask the groups if they were able to solve the problem and to describe their solutions. Lastly, we present the code solution we ourselves have written to solve the problem while giving out helpful pointers along the way. Each week, we post our problems and solutions to this website which allows anyone to practice them if they can't attend a meeting.