Interviewing for a part time internship for Entry Level IT. I am a full time student Comp Sci major and wanna go into networking, servers, security, so hopefully this gets me my foot in the door. I am a terrible soft skills person and really nervous. My friends told me to print out my resume and transcripts, I will surely do that. Anybody got anything else to suggest?
Update: I got the position! I honestly didn’t even prepare for it, didn’t even know what the company did. The comment that talked about learning to search things up was right on, they asked me what I would do if I didn’t know how to do something. I answered “looking things up, asking others, and consult documentation.” The company seemed really cool and is structured pretty much like Valve Corp in that they wanted jacks of all trades and it was company owned.
Thank you for all the helpful advice. It definitely helped me out, and hopefully, it helps others out as well.
Relax, show a willingness to learn and you’ll be ok.
I got my start working for university IT and made it all the way to a CS Ph.D. and into industry.
Edit: and get good sleep! It’s nearly midnight on the West coast, get as much good quality sleep as you can.
Don’t try to BS your way through answers; if you don’t know, let them know that but also tell them how you’d go about getting that information.
My tip.is always to remember that this is not yours to loose, its just an interview like a 1000 others you’ll have. If you don’t get it you didn’t, try again tomorrow. When I think like that I’m usualy more relax and don’t over talk.
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Be prepared to talk about class projects you’ve done, what went well, what didn’t go well and how you’d improve that next time. If you do any extracurriculars like clubs, game night, or even a frat, include that as it shows you can be social.
It’s okay to be nervous. You’re not a CONfidence man.
Go to the bathroom before you go into the place.
Remember that you are also interviewing them. They won’t expect you to know all the answers, but will want someone that they can work with. If you can, answer questions with the STAR method (situation, task, approach, result), but don’t waffle. You can use one piece of experience in a variety of ways: teamwork, research, urgent deadline etc.
It’s ok to say that you are nervous, they should try to put you at ease.
You may be asked ‘trick questions’, these are not usually to to you up but to see how you work an unknown problem. There is no right answer. Not knowing stuff is ok. Not being able to think up a plan is less so.
Remember whatever the outcome, this is really useful experience. See if you can get a site tour, ask about the tech used… You can then add this to your knowledge for later. In my experience, industry is frequently several years ahead of academia so you get a good chance to understand the real world.
Not in your industry, but I’ve interviewef many, many…too many people who were looking for entry level positions and although I had the standard hot sheet of corp. questions, what I was looking for was how this person would fit into the team, if they were willing to learn (demonstrated or had examples), and if they had a good personality/traits.
Do not beat yourself up if you do not get the position, I have turned down people because they were better than what I was offering and knew it would not work out if I hired them then.
Ask where this position may lead to and what skill sets you’re expected to gain from the experience in an internship role.
Good luck.
Wait you turned down people because they were too good?
It happens, you know they won’t last because they will take the first opportunity to fit thier skill level and leave you high n dry. It’s overqualified.
Good luck. Nice to see happy news here.
STAR. For every question try to give a situation, task, action and result which came from you personally. E.g. situation, someone was manually copying data from an online portal every month. As a task, you’re asked to write some code which scrapes an API, and you defined the task via docs and planned tests. Then as an action you worked on it for a few days, and the result was the company didn’t need to manually spend a few days per month doing it, freeing up people to do more exciting things.
It shows you understand the problem and know how to go about solving it in a professional way.
Interviewing is a very specific muscle. You should try and do as many as you can. It’s also something you should regularly practice, even if you have a job you love and never want to leave. I’d say every year or two, just go and interview at a half dozen companies for roles that could be interesting to you.
I’ve just been through several rounds of interviews with different companies for a tech role. You want to build a brand and learn to communicate it to others. This doesn’t mean you need to write a laundry list of skills that you’ve obtained but rather define who you are and practice explaining that to strangers.
Nothing can prepare you for an interview scenario except and interviews. I’ve been in customer facing roles as well as being the interviewer and the only thing they have in common with being interviewed is that you’re sharing a table with someone else.
Good luck for tomorrow!
Hope I’m not too late. I just interviewed over a dozen people for an IT position so I have some experience as an employer
Be enthusiastic, be confident, if you don’t know the answer say ‘i don’t know but I’ll Google it later!’ because tech skills are not as important sometimes, it’s more like how will you get along with the team. Treat it as a fun opportunity to talk about your goals. Make sure you ask them questions, like what is the rest of the onboarding process like, how many more interviews, are the opportunities to grow in this position, is this a new position or am I filling in for someone who left? How many people on my team? And then end the interview by saying ‘i look forward to working with you’
Be confident, be enthusiastic. You got this
This is a pretty good answer. I tried to be as enthusiastic as possible, asked lots of questions and being curious. Also, I admitted to not knowing some stuff like when they asked about EDR, I admitted I forgot what the acronym stood for. One other person also said they forgot what it stood for as well.
Ask ‘what success looks like’ at said company.
Hell yea, glad you got it. I have my third interview at a software company later today, here’s hoping.
Networking/security is some really neat stuff, I have dabbled as I used to work doing systems stuff, but moved to robotics automations after that. See if you can get your new employer interested in paying a bit for you to get certs at some point (often if you bring it up that you want some cert, they might be interested in putting some percentage of money towards helping you get it), Network+ and those other Cisco certs are pretty sought after as I understand it and could definitely help progress your career.
Also welcome to the industry!
