I applied through my university COOP program for a 4-month position. I was called in for an interview two weeks after applying.

At first, it was a phone interview, but it later changed to a 1:1 interview.

I prepared by researching IBM, its history, the products it offers, and its vision statement.

I was interviewed by two very nice gentlemen in their 40s who were both project leads at IBM. The interview started off with:

• Tell us a bit about yourself.
• How do you handle conflicts?
• Talk about one of your development projects.
• Explain a time where you had to work with a team.
• Do you believe that software can be perfect? (The correct answer is NO)

Later on, we moved to technical questions:

• Outline the steps of the software development life cycle.
• How can you make a database more optimized?
• If you were required to take over a current role as a developer and saw that the code could be improved (readability, efficiency), would you take the time to make it better? Would you take the time to make changes if you had a short timeline to complete the project?
• How would you write a program in JAVA to determine if a string contained any of the given list of characters?
• Other JAVA-related questions (quite fair if you know JAVA).

Overall, the experience was great. There were many things in the job description that I did not know; in fact, I had no experience with or had even heard of almost the entire list of technical requirements. However, I kept reiterating to the interviewers that I was a fast learner, always took initiative to fulfill my responsibilities, and would learn many of the required things before being given the opportunity (I would have two months to prepare).

I received the offer later on and accepted the opportunity over offers from CIBC and TELUS.

Looking forward to working for IBM, starting in January.

TIP for future interviewees: KNOW what you put on your resume; don't make things up. With technical jobs like this one, interviewers like to test you about stuff you've added to your resume, so make sure you have an idea of what you wrote and can talk about it in the interview.

Hope this helps.