I am currently a junior in EE at Caltech.

I had been an Explore intern the summer before, so I was able to use my campus recruiter contacts to help initiate an interview process quite early in October. Being an Explore intern before, however, didn't really give any more advantages than that. I had only done basic software, and the position I was looking for was in hardware, which was my real interest and passion.

The interview process was longer than that of the software positions. Instead of 3 back-to-back, we had 4-5 interviews back-to-back. All of us were placed in a large conference room, and people were just being called out one by one. The most competitive schools that other candidates were from, that I can remember, were Carnegie Mellon and possibly UC Berkeley. It might have just been that I was at a very early interview round.

Each interview was with someone from a different team working on popular products. The questions were very different as well, ranging from basic analog and digital to basic signal processing. There were no software questions.

Given a black box, how would you convert a pulse signal into a sinusoidal output?

Write a finite state machine for a soda machine that takes only returns 5, 10, and 25 cents.

Some op-amp configuration questions. Wasn't too bad if you remember the basics.

Class A amp with BJT. Asked about characterizing the bias, small-signal gain, etc. Basic fundamentals.