To whoever is reading this, I know you're probably nervous about your interview, and I want to tell you this: don't be. The only thing that's stopping you from doing well is yourself. I know that's super clichéd, but it's true. Don't let your nerves get in the way; you're going to do fabulous!

Some info about me: I'm a sophomore at Stanford, a woman, and a soon-to-be CS major.

I applied online by submitting my resume. After a couple of weeks of waiting, I decided to contact my recruiter and ask if he needed any more materials from me. He then scheduled a phone interview about a week later. The questions asked in the phone interview were mostly behavioral: tell me about yourself, why did you get into computer science, what is your favorite software/hardware project, what would you change about it, etc.

Then, I was sent an email the next morning telling me that I was invited for final round interviews in January. I was flown up to Seattle in January for a three-day trip, all expenses paid. I went to a mixer with the recruiters and fellow interviewees on Monday and went back to my free room in the Westin (oh my god).

I was assigned to the morning round of interviews and was driven to the Microsoft campus at 8:00 AM. I had three one-hour interviews with fifteen-minute breaks between them. I spent the fifteen-minute breaks eating free food and playing Halo 4 on the Xbox in the waiting room.

I was incredibly, incredibly nervous. I had never done a technical interview before. My first interviewer was a super cool guy, and I talked to him about my interests and projects on my resume before he asked me a technical question. My second interviewer and I basically became best friends. I had to design an app, explain what data structures I would use, and code up some algorithms. We spent a lot of time just talking about life and his experiences, however. My third interviewer asked me to implement an ArrayList, which took about ten minutes to do, before we spent the rest of the time talking and hanging out, discussing Microsoft culture, what to expect as an intern, etc.

Honestly, if you can have a conversation with your interviewers and show how much you want to work there, you will be fine. The technical questions are not hard. I came into the interviews unbelievably nervous and came out super relaxed, with the emails of my interviewers in my pocket. They were such incredible people to talk to, and the recruiting team was great. 100% couldn't have asked for a better experience for my first interview/recruiting process.

I flew back to school the next day. A couple of my friends who had come to interview at Redmond received word back before I did. About a week later, I received an email telling me that it had taken a little longer to get back to me because my interviewers had decided to offer me a Software Development Internship rather than an Explore Microsoft one. What a plot twist.

Tl;dr: Don't worry. You're going to be fine. Brush up on your coding skills (I used Cracking the Coding Interview), and practice your behavioral questions. Let them know how much you want to work there, and enjoy your three-day stay in Seattle. Even if you don't get the job, you're going to learn so, so much.

1. Describe how you would implement an ArrayList (three ways), but discuss the drawbacks/efficiency of each.

2. Implement atoi().

3. Design your favorite app.