A university recruiter reached out to me in mid-fall to schedule an onsite interview (I was previously an engineering intern at Google).

I had a short, non-technical phone call with the recruiter. During the call, she asked me about my technical interests, what I was looking for in a full-time role, and which products at Google I wanted to work on.

After that, she connected me with a recruiting coordinator to set up my flight, hotel, and interview day logistics.

The interview day was alright but felt a little rushed and impersonal to me. I was told that my interviews would begin at 10 am. My interview host for the day greeted me in the lobby a few minutes after 10 and rushed me to my first interview at 10:15 am.

The room was tiny (I could barely write my code on the whiteboard) and not very sound-proof. The day consisted of four 45-minute coding interviews in total.

The first two were in the morning, after which I had lunch with a different Google engineer than my interviewers. I then had two more interviews after lunch.

The questions weren't too difficult overall, mostly standard questions on algorithms and data structures on a whiteboard. I got:

• Two on manipulating strings and arrays
• One on binary trees
• One recursive problem simulating a board game

Given a list of strings, how do you split it into lists of anagrams?