My Internship Experience

Position: Software Engineer Intern Postman, San Francisco Summer 2022

Postman is a product-based organization that deals with end-to-end API development and testing. I applied for the Software Engineer Intern position for Summer 2022 in early January while I was pursuing my Master's in Computer Science at the University of California, Riverside.

Resume Screening

It all began when I was applying for summer internship opportunities rapidly, as I had no interview calls and most of my friends were in the final rounds of interviews or had already secured one. I was blindly applying to every other organization until one fine day I got an email from a recruiter at Postman saying my application was shortlisted and I was being moved to the first round (screening round).

First Round

A week later, I received the email for my first round. It was pretty straightforward, where I had to solve a LeetCode medium problem (a variant of Total Paths in a Matrix), and the second question involved some basic calculations like average, mean, and median on given data to generate results. I solved both questions just before the deadline and was moved to the second round.

Second Round

In five days, I received a call for another interview. This was the final round and consisted of two interviews within a one-hour span. I was quite nervous because this was the final round, and there was a panel of three Engineers from the team I would be working for.

Finally, the time came, and after a brief introduction, I explained the projects I had mentioned on my resume, and we moved to the coding exercise. Luckily, I encountered a similar question to "Find Peak Element in an Array." I provided the brute force solution, followed by the optimized approach. The interview was quite interactive, with the interviewer constantly asking me to dry run my code at every step. Finally, he asked me to dry run on a few test cases of his own and was satisfied with my solution.

Final Call

To my surprise, I received a final call within a week with the offer for Software Engineer Intern at Postman. I was glad since I had used Postman at my previous organization, and now I was going to work for it. Also, I was glad because I finally secured an internship in March and could breathe in peace, considering how critical it is for international students to secure a good internship in the US.

1. Total number of ways to reach a point in a matrix

2. Find Peak element