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.
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Don’t try to bullshit your way through anything. It’s actually a strength to admit that you don’t know something. Bonus points if you can describe the resources you would use to learn the answer.
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Almost a repeat of the first one, but slightly different. Don’t play buzzword bingo or you’ll sound like the 5th grader that just learned a new curse word and is showing it off on the playground. It’s fine to use the industry jargon in appropriate ways; just be sure you know them.
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It’s an entry level position. The kind of skills and initiative they’re going to be looking for is the desire to learn, the ability to correct/improve documentation, understanding/following procedures, thoughtful suggestions for improvements, and having enough confidence and competence that they don’t have to babysit you constantly.
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Networking / servers / security really covers a lot of ground and it leaves me wondering exactly what it is you’re saying you’d like to do. Give some thought about how this entry level position helps you build your skills on your path to your ultimate goal and how you’ll provide value along the way.
Everything here, but I’d like to build a little on this.
Remember that you are also interviewing the company. You need to make a decision about whether this is a place you want to work. Will it give you the opportunity to learn when you need to learn? Are they a team that treat each other well? Do they have good dynamics? Can you see yourself benefiting from working here beyond just taking a pay check?
Worth noting and not crazy important for an entry level position. Double true if there are limited options available. Take the job, learn some skills (including how to work in a bad environment) and then look for and move on to better opportunities. Caveat: Just don’t take one of these roles with a place where it’s going to stereotype you and/or give you no transferable skills.
Even if you decide to compromise, it’s worth doing so knowing that you are. It also looks good to the employer if you’re taking a real interest in the position and sizing it up.
Even if it is a deadend job, usually a year doesn’t hurt. Unless the work or pay suck, but that’s true everywhere.
Bullshit only works on non technical people. If you are in a technical interview saying you don’t know is the correct answer.
Im a senior engineer at a global MSP, when doing my interview I 100% blanked on the TCP threeway handshake. Even now I only remember 2 of the steps, syn and synack.
Building on this, if you don’t know at first but think you might, it’s ok to ask questions to flesh out and better understand the question. It highlights your troubleshooting skills. If you still don’t know and they tell you the answer, there’s nothing wrong with asking follow up questions. This can demonstrate your interest in the subject as well as possibly highlight knowledge they haven’t specifically asked you about.
In this vein, don’t forget that logs usually exist, and if they don’t you can often enable debugging. When something’s going wrong the first question I usually try to answer is “what’s the error message?” There isn’t always one, but if there is, knowing it can be a big help.
ETA: Most technical interviewers recognize that the average candidate will need some training for their specific environment, especially for junior positions. They’re looking for trainability, critical thinking, and troubleshooting skills. You may not be well versed in the specific tool they use for, e.g., configuration management, but if you demonstrate an understanding of the concept, that will show them that you can be easily trained to meet their specific needs.
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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.
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.
Talk about your interests. Show a passion for your hobbies outside of work/the industry. Relate those passions to your goals within the industry. Generally just be interested and they’ll find you interesting. You got this!
Update edit: Congrats on the offer!
Go to bed
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.
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.
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Force yourself to smile and say something f like “good to meet you” or “thanks for seeing me” . Soft skills come naturally to some, but the tricks can be learned by anyone and are based on manners.
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Have a couple of anecdotes about your approach to problem solving. Doesn’t matter what they are, there is no right or wrong answer, just have your approach ready in your head.
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If its help desk, say you like helping people. One line i used a long time ago, was something like “I am quite shy on the telephone, but i actually helping people with technical problems “. It’s just keeping it real, a credible .
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Consider de-emphasising your technical ambitions. They’ll have a dozen people saying they want to be a CCIE or data scientists or whatever the current flavour is.
Instead, I’d with “I’m doing well on with compsci degree, I don’t have any difficulties with the technical aspects, but I really want to see how my skills fit into a company, and make a start on understanding the realities of a business environment “
They want some one they can worth with, they can worth with almost anyone , but they won’t want to work with an “unknown”, so the more you can give - no matter who you are - the better.
You got it.
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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.
Yes, it’s a thing that happens. It’s quite common for an over-qualified person to be bored, hard to work with, and just picking up a paycheck while they’re looking for different work. Hiring an employee is expensive. If you can’t keep them for a while and/or they’re not a good fit for the team then you can be better off just leaving the position vacant.
If the interviewer brings up personal life/trying to get to k ow you stuff be totally willing to expand on your interests. The interviewer is filtering k personal skills. Simply being able to talk about a hobby is a form of bridge building between people they seem to value. Create a script. Imagine a person asks you about your free time, have conversations in your head with the fictional person.
Do the same for talking points related to your resume. Everything you put on there is a potential question they’ll ask. For example, put that you have experience with security and they are you to ask about what you’ve done or know regarding that. Pre-write an answer.
My best advice is thus: pretend to be a jacksss gatekeeper and read your application from that perspective. Write down your critique. In your head argue against that and write it down. Memorize those talking points.
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!
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.
