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.
Good luck. Nice to see happy news here.
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.
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.
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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/knowledge.
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.
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.
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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.
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!
Congrats! Welcome to the field. You’ll be slinging ones and zeros in no time.
I have no idea what slinging ones and zeros mean but thanks
Moving bits of data: networking.
Oh I guess. I just thought it was really broad. Could’ve been literally anything computer related and even circuits related.
I mean, it could also be data recovery, malware thwarting, etc. Working with digital devices. It’s just a computer thing.
How did it go?
I updated the post. It went really well. I got the job. I kept asking a bunch of questions and it wasn’t too hard to do that since the company is really interesting since they dive into so many products.
Congrats!
It’s okay to be nervous. You’re not a CONfidence man.
Go to the bathroom before you go into the place.
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!
Ask what ‘what success looks like’ at said company.
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.
krill your interviewer and seal his identity
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.
