I applied online. The next day in the afternoon, about 24 hours later, I received a call from Massachusetts. It was from MathWorks. The recruiter asked me a few behavioral questions, including multitasking and examples. She also asked about my GPA and a little about my MS thesis. Finally, she scheduled a technical phone interview for two weeks later. The call lasted approximately 15 minutes. She immediately sent me an email:

"The interview will take approximately 40 minutes and will cover:

• Basic math (linear algebra, differential equations, and calculus)
• Programming concepts (understanding syntax and how languages work)
• One programming language (C, C++, or Java) (if C++ is selected, understand syntax, structure, compilation, and OOP concepts)
• MATLAB (basic MATLAB syntax, programming, and data concepts)
• Signal Processing (z-transforms, region of convergence, filter design, stability, noise, elementary system theory, the frequency domain, system response, and the time domain)

There will also be some non-technical questions."

Two weeks later, I had the technical phone interview. The interviewer was from India, and I felt she didn't know much about the position, as she only repeated information from the job posting when I asked her questions. She started directly with technical questions. It was 100% technical. She said she would pass my score to the hiring manager and that they would contact me in about two weeks if they were interested; otherwise, I would not hear from them. The call lasted a total of 50 minutes.

After my first phone call, my status in the MathWorks system changed to "Interview process." The morning after my technical phone interview, my status updated to "Match not ideal at this time." I never heard from them again. I believe I answered about 75% of the questions well, so study and review everything thoroughly if you want to pass to the next interview step! I suspect they expect candidates to answer more than 99% of the questions correctly.

Good luck, everyone! I'm sharing some of my interview questions; I hope this helps!

• Basic Math

What is a derivative? What is an integral? What is the relationship between an integral and a derivative?

What is an eigenvalue? What is an eigenvector?

Given the following matrix: A = [[2, 1], [-1, 2]], what are the eigenvalues and eigenvectors? How did you calculate these?

What is a linear differential equation? Why? Explain.

What is a singular matrix? What is a symmetric matrix? What is an identity matrix?

Given A = [2a, 3g, 4k] and B = [3a, 2g, -1k], what is the dot product? How did you calculate it? Factorize your answer.

If A and B are matrices, what properties should they have to be multiplied?

• Programming Concepts

What is a virtual statement? What is a break statement? What is the difference between break and continue statements?

What does a destructor do? Why is it important?

If you have a virtual statement, do you need to declare your destructor as virtual? Why?

What is a recursive function? Give an example.

• One Programming Language (C++)

What does the line of code #define alpha beta do? What does the line of code #define alpha 100 do?

What do these lines of code do? #ifdef alpha #endif

What is the difference between malloc and calloc?

• MATLAB

How do you save a variable in a .mat file? How do you save specific variables in a .mat file? How do you open these data files? How can you see the type of a variable? How can you compute the inverse of a matrix? How do you compute the transpose of a matrix? What does A.*B do? What does A*B do? What does A.' do? What does A.^-1 do? What does A' do? How do you find help in MATLAB? How do you plot a variable? What is a script? What is a function? Is a script the same as a function?

If you type A=1, the answer is A=1. If you type 1, the answer is ans=1. How do you prevent the answer from being displayed? Using a semicolon (;).

• Signal Processing

What is the Z-transform? What is its expression? What is the region of convergence?

If you have a pole exactly on the unit circle (at 1), is the system stable? If you have a pole outside the unit circle, is the system stable?

What is a causal system? What is a Linear Time Invariant (LTI) system? Why? Explain. How it works? What is a Linear Time Varying (LTV) system? Why? Explain. How it works?

Given h[n] = [1, 2, 3, 0, 1], where the value of 0 is at n=3, what is the Z-transform? If x[n] = n and y[n] = delta[n-3], what is x multiplied by y?

What's the difference between continuous-time and discrete-time systems? Can you convert a continuous system into a discrete system? How? Explain. Can you convert a discrete system into a continuous system? How? Explain.

What is Power Spectral Density? How is it computed?