Expedia came to campus back in November, and I had completely missed them. While they were here, they hired two friends of mine for the summer, and I was worried I had missed the boat. I applied online to Bellevue and Chicago in November, and they sent me back two rejections, both before even conducting rounds of interviews.

I applied again anyway to Bellevue, and even though that was my third time applying online, this time they sent me back a HackerRank coding challenge. There were two simple coding challenges that both used specific data structures: Queue, Stack, and unordered set. I got 19 out of 20 test cases passed.

Later that day, I received an email for a behavioral interview. I just had to talk about myself, things I liked from school, and past coding experiences. After that, I received another email for a live interview over a Skype-like platform.

During my live interview, I was asked to do a BFS. I struggled a lot, but I kept talking through it, and with the help of my interviewer, I managed to complete it. Then they had me adjust the code to do a similar operation, and I really couldn't do it. But I kept talking through it with my interviewer, and he walked me through it. I coded it as we talked.

Two weeks later, I got my offer of hire!

THE MAIN THING IS COMMUNICATION. These companies want people who can communicate and who understand that only 11% of companies believe students learn enough in school to be a software engineer.

If you're a student, please, for the love of everything beautiful, do personal projects every day and build full-scale stuff. None of this 'I don't have time' stuff. I have 18 credits this semester, 20-hour work weeks, and I am president of a school club, and I still find two hours every other day for personal coding. If you are too busy, you just don't want to be successful badly enough.

Data Structures,

DS Algo,

CTCI