Cracking Campus Interview — 5 Points
You are probably here because you either have campus placement interviews lined up or you are very much worried about your final year interviews. You may be nervous about your first interview experience or would like to understand what a campus placement interview means. In this post, I would like to list five important points that may ease your interview process. This post is written keeping technical interviews in mind however some points may be generally applicable. As they say, there is no shortcut to success, so is true for cracking an interview.
You may not be the smartest person :
The very basic point that concerns most of us is — “I am surely not the smartest in this lot, will I be able to make it”? There are people who get straight A’s; there are ones who keep doing cool stuff and are always in limelight. There are people who have interned at big companies I could only wish for. Those who belong to this category and have been performing well on all fronts, worry about their next frontier with the interviews. While those on the other side worry about the tough competition. Well, if you leave out some companies looking out for top percentile others care mainly about the best fit. They are just looking for the right attitude, the desire to work and explore. So you never know, you might just be the right candidate.
Drive the interview :
Is it always up to the interviewer to drive an interview and take the talk in the direction he wants? Well, not always, at times you can drive the interview and also ruin it completely. It is the interviewer who starts bombarding the questions but you should be careful enough while you introduce new terms in the process of answering a particular question. If you introduce new catchy terms that you are well versed with you are surely moving in the right direction; at the same time introducing terms you are not sure of answering only shows that these are just keywords for you. This creates a very bad impression and often hard to recover from. Even when you answer the question make sure that you do with it a non-confused face. A smart interviewer will read your face and drill you on the shady patch.
Think aloud :
Imagine the interviewer is asking you to solve a question. You think over it for 10 mins and all you could come up with is- sorry I am unable to proceed. The interviewer might not like his time being wasted for nothing in return thus denting your chances. It is very important to convey how are you approaching the problem; what possibilities are you thinking of. He might immediately stop you if you are heading in a completely wrong direction or help you get out of small hurdles. This actually reduces your search space; conveys your thought process to the interviewer and keeps him engaged.
Enjoy the discussion :
While you might think of an interview as a form of your exams; it is far away from being so. Treat the interview process as a discussion between you and the interviewer. You discuss different problems and their solutions. Even if you do not make it through the interview, in the end, you and the interviewer should feel satisfied of having an engaging discussion. If you are able to convert a boring question-answer session into an engaging discussion you get straight away your chances high. This is an important skill they are looking out for which is very much important when you are working in a team.
Believe in yourself :
This is the most important point that I want to leave you with. If you get this right you are halfway through the interview. Do not think about the competition; do not think about your lack of domain knowledge. You cannot go beyond what you know; your current state of knowledge. All you can do is- appropriately convey all that you know and show them that you will be able to apply your current knowledge in the right way. So stop worrying about what you don’t know instead focus on how you can rightly convey whatever you know. A good interviewer will try to bring out the best in you and will not bug you on your weakness. Do not lose confidence, if your interview is not going well- one right answer and you will be back on track. Do not think your life depends on this interview because 5 years down the line you will realize nothing ever mattered. Moreover, companies are more desperate to have the right candidate than your desperation to land into a company.
You have come this far in your life; you have solved many personal and academic issues; you have cracked JEE, CET, etc. I believe every person is good at problem-solving given the right set of problems and given, he is interested. So no matter what others say- Believe in yourself; you will sail through!
