After a career fair at my school, I spoke with the Google recruiter. They suggested I apply online within the next few days to be eligible for an on-campus interview in a few weeks.

A recruiter contacted me 10 days later for a technical phone screen. It seemed I hadn't made the on-campus interview.

I arranged for a phone interview, scheduled to take place in 5 days' time.

The phone interview stretched on for over 45 minutes, and the connection wasn't very good. I was asked about my experience, general knowledge, and two coding problems – one easier and one harder.

On the easier problem, I had to rethink the algorithm twice to achieve a time complexity the interviewer was satisfied with. On the second problem, I got stuck for a few minutes on an off-by-one error.

The recruiter called me later, offering an onsite interview. I requested to be interviewed for the Seattle/Kirkland office, so she transferred me to a different recruiter who handles that location.

I scheduled the onsite as soon as I could (in about two weeks' time) because I had a deadline for another offer. Both recruiters were understanding and provided prompt responses.

The onsite consisted of four technical interviews, each an hour long, with an hour-long lunch break in between. All five interviewers asked if I had questions, so by the end of the day, I was grasping at straws for any new questions to ask.

Each technical interview included two whiteboard coding questions of about equal difficulty. (One interviewer asked three coding questions, but the first was just a warm-up.)

• On two interviews, I answered all questions before time ran out.
• On one interview, the interviewer made me realize the function I had just coded wouldn't solve the problem right as time ran out. I held him back for a few seconds as I drew out the correct solution on the board for him.
• On the last interview, time ran out before I could code up the answer to the problem.

It was all data structures and algorithms with no architecture questions, but that's probably because I was a new grad.

One interviewer was friendly and enthusiastic. Two of them were pretty withdrawn, so I had no idea whether they liked what I was doing or not. The last one was blunt and quick to tell me when I was doing something wrong, but he also never brushed off my questions or unusual algorithm ideas.

Two weeks after the onsite interview, I received an offer for after graduation.

I feel that coding interviews are as much psychological as they are technical. You have to keep a cool head during a stressful situation and accept criticism with good grace. You also need to be able to communicate your ideas very quickly and effectively. I drew out diagrams on the whiteboard while brainstorming – having visual aids really helps.

I was surprised when the first thing they asked about was the prior experience on my resume. I was expecting only technical questions and hadn't brushed up on my past projects.