GAD: UTCS Graduate Student Advising Day Asking and Answering Interview Questions Kathryn S McKinley

Interviewing Internships Job Industry Research Labs Academia (teaching and research focus)

Internships What they want: What you get: They have a project and they need help They want you to define a research project with them They want to “test drive” you for a summer and get an edge on hiring What you get: More technical experience Exposure to real world problems “Test drive” the company Technical contacts Some cash

Internship Sample Questions About you: Tell me about yourself What are you working on and why it is interesting? How many lines of code have you written? Why should I hire you? What can you do here? Basic technical questions How do you implement a lock? What hardware support is required? How would you design a binary tree that is efficient for counting the sum of all the nodes? Explain how an OS, DMA, branch predictor, memory, etc. works How can you reverse the order of words in a string using constant space overhead

Internship Sample Questions Specific technical questions What does the OS do when a program is loaded? How would you write code to do a bit swizzle (swap the values of even & odd bits)? Describe heuristics for register spilling; live range splitting Suppose a processor has a buggy opcode that crashes the processor when it is executed. How do you generate a program that uses that opcode? You are given a random number generator that generates a random float between 0 and 1. You are also given a histogram of data that consists of ranges of latencies, and the number of occurrences of latencies within each range found by sampling a network. Create a simulator for this network. In particular, include a method that returns a latency value such that the latencies mimic the probabilities represented in the histogram. Describe how a branch predictor works. Start with the simplest branch predictor you can possibly create and work your way to more complex ones from there. Comment on what the branch predictor's characteristics mean with respect to writing efficient code.

Questions to ask them Will I be able to publish results from my internship? How can I access my code after the internship ends if we still need to run experiments for a paper? Who will I be working with? Who is the leader of the group? Will there be other interns? How long? Salary? Housing? Travel to/from internship? Can you go on conference or other travel you need to do during the internship period.

Job (in industry, lab, academia) More about you Next questions based on your thesis How would you fit in here? Who would you work with? What are your long term career/research/teaching goals? What can you teach? Why do you want to come here? Where else are you interviewing?

Job (in industry, lab, academia) Technical questions What are the most important research questions in your area? 10 year research goal Short term research goals (e.g., next n papers) How would you fit in technically? I am working on X. (If you don’t have any questions or response to their work, they will think you are a dud.) Should our company do X? What is your opinion on Y’s new web browser?

Specific vs. general questioning Instead of: Is your department collegial? Ask: Who do you collaborate with? What does your company/department do for career development? Ask: Who is your mentor? How often do you go to conferences? Are decisions consensus based? Ask: What was the last difficult technical/hiring/resource allocation decision? How did it get made? What is the quality of your colleagues/students? Ask: Where did your recent PhD graduates get jobs? Do your colleagues publish?