Interviewing 101
The ultimate guide to interviewing for your first job or internship
The Interview.
Besides being a hilarious comedy movie starring James Franco and Seth Rogen, it is also one of the most daunting parts of the internship hunt process.
Let’s imagine you’ve applied to dozens or hundreds of internship offers. While doing so, you’ve received a good amount of rejection (and even complete ghosting) from recruiters. BUT THEN!
You get the lovely “Congratulations! We’d love to offer you a first-round interview for [xyz role] for [abc company]” email, and you’re jumping for joy.
Hooray!
Now what? How do you prepare? How can you maximize your chances of getting the offer?
These are all tremendous questions, and important ones to be asking. In this article, we’ll focus on how great preparation can increase your chances of getting an offer, and how to go about preparing for your interviews.
For a more general internship or resume guide, check out my articles here and here.
A few housekeeping things before we get started with the main show:
Everything here is based on my personal experiences in many interviews — I’m only sharing the tips and tricks that have worked for me
A lot of the knowledge I share I learned in Steve Ross’s Econ 185 class at UCLA. Please take it if you can!
This article is for behavioral interviews for business-related internships. There won’t be much technical stuff shared here. For your reference, behavioral interviews are those about your background and experiences, whereas technical interviews may be questions about accounting, business valuation, consulting cases, design methodologies, writing computer code, etc. To learn more about consulting case interviews, check out my article here.
Let’s go!
If there’s one thing you should take away from this piece, it’s this: for a behavioral interview, 95% of the battle is in the preparation you do beforehand.
Since this is the case, the preparation you have before an interview is EXTREMELY important and should be methodically done before each and every interview you have.
Yes, it’s tedious, but it pays huge dividends when you start getting more offers from your great preparation.
At the bare minimum, you should know the following things before you come into any interview:
What does the company do? Why do you want to work for the company?
What is the role? Why do you want to work in that role?
The background of your interviewer
The goal of this preparation is to present very strong reasons for why you’re a good fit for the company by tailoring your introduction and responses in the interview. Most importantly, you need to have some great questions to ask after the official interview ends. At the end of every interview ever, the interviewer will ask, “Do you have any questions for me?”
Usually, this is not taken seriously at all — candidates might ask a super basic question like, “What’s a day in your life like?”, “How would you describe the company culture?”, or “What do you like about working here?”
BORING
What a snooze fest!
With your preparation, you’ll be equipped with AMAZING questions that will blow away your interviewer. We’ll be building upon this idea of great questions much more later on.
Right off the bat, you may be thinking, “Dennis, I want to work for the company because I need a job, want money, and this is a good experience for my resume. What am I supposed to say in the interview?”
Well-said, dear reader, well-said. Needing a job, wanting money, and looking for resume experience are all pretty self-explanatory, but in the preparations for the interview, you need to come up with much more convincing reasons for the questions I mentioned above. Without such concrete reasons, your interview will seem a lot more artificial and result in lower chances of receiving the job offer.
Now, let’s walk through an example!
Let’s pretend we’re a second-year student called “Bob”, who just got the following email in his inbox (I changed the name of Bob from someone else I know for privacy reasons):
Thanks for your interest in the Business Development Intern (Summer 2024) position at Second Order Effects! The interview will comprise of a mixture of behavioral and technical questions to assess your breadth of knowledge and exposure to business development.
You are confirmed for your initial virtual interview on [date and time]. You will be speaking with me, [recruiter name].
Bob and I met up one afternoon and spent about an hour preparing for the interview. Here’s what we got:
What does the company do? Why do you want to work for the company?
The key thing for this question is to have a firm grasp on what the company does, recent projects and news, and cool things that they do. Ideally, you’ll bring up some of this information during your interview to show that you know what you applied for and that you’re excited about working there. Scour their website, LinkedIn page, and the “Recent News” feature on Google. I’d also recommend putting the following prompt into Perplexity to see what background research it gives you as a starting point:
Hey! I just got an email about an upcoming interview I have for [company name] for [company role]. Please give me background information about the company, the role, and my interviewer on LinkedIn. Thanks!
[copy paste your email invite here along with the job listing page]
For Second Order Effects, we came up with the following research about the company:
Second Order Effects (SOE) is an engineering consultancy that transforms uncertainty into fully functional hardware and software. They work on projects at various stages of development and scope
They perform analysis, build prototypes, and take products to market. Their cross-disciplinary team solves critical problems across numerous industries, including automotive, aerospace, consumer electronics, industrial automation, biomedical, green energy, and marine. Their designs control rocket engines, manage satellite communications, generate safety overrides for self-driving cars, and are enjoyed by consumers around the world.
Founded in 2016, Second Order Effects has 90+ employees (and counting!) in offices in El Segundo, California and Redmond, Washington. As a partner, on retainer, or on demand, they’ve worked with 90+ clients on 250+ projects, none of which involve weapons.
Projects that they’ve done (to mention during the interview):
UCLA Coco delivery bots! - As a UCLA student, Bob sees these delivery bots around campus and loves them
JPL Case Study to mention during the interview
From this information, Bob and I identified the following things to mention about the company during his interview:
It’s an engineering consultancy, which combines his interests in both engineering and business.
For engineering, mention their cool projects with robotics and software; for business, mention their entrepreneurship and consulting focus.
The company is a good mix of exposure to both fields, so excited to learn and grow while working there.
Working on a Second Order Effects team will be similar to how Bob worked on technical projects in school.
Notice that we were able to come up with some solid reasons for Bob wanting to work there, even if the primary reason for applying was to get a job and put something on the resume.
What is the role? Why do you want to work in that role?
Now that your company research is done, we’ll focus on the role itself. Since most companies have a wide variety of teams and functions, the interviewer will wonder why you applied for your specific one — you need to have great reasons for doing so!
For this research, just look at the exact job listing that you applied for and go from there. Notice the different skills they’re looking for, and tailor your experiences to those skills in your stories.
Here’s what Bob’s preparations told him about the role, directly from the job listings:
As a Business Development Intern, you will help identify and grow business relationships across all of SOE’s engineering services. On a daily basis, you will help us expand our potential customer base and help the team accomplish their business or engineering goals.
The Business Development team is responsible for company growth through the expansion of services revenue and data-driven strategic development of new business opportunities.
We provide new opportunities for the SOE team, increase the value we capture from our work, and identify new ways to support our clients as well as strengthen interfaces across the business to other groups, such as Engineering, Programs, and Operations.
Make sure you know exactly what you’re applying for to avoid awkward conversations in the interview and show your proactiveness. I did a lot of preparation for my JP Morgan credit banking interview during my second year, and my interviewers were very clearly impressed that I knew so much about the role! Do that preparation too, and you’ll see great success.
The background of your interviewer
(Your interviewer’s name is usually emailed to you before the interview. If not, email the recruiter to ask who your interviewer is and they’ll happily provide the information)
A common occurrence for people going through interviews is that they forget their interviewer is a person, too. This sounds obvious, but when you’re super nervous and overwhelmed, it can be hard to remember that the person in front of you or on your screen is just as human as you.
The best way to combat this nervousness is to know your interviewer extremely well before the interview even starts. Not only will this help you relax, you’ll be able to prepare some great questions and tailor your answers to who you’re speaking. The ultimate goal is to build a personal, friendly connection with the interviewer as early as possible during the interview to make the rest of it much smoother). In other words, you want your interviewer to like you ASAP.
Knowing the interviewer’s background is key to this.
Here’s what you should focus on:
Where/what they studied
Where/what they worked
Anything and everything on their LinkedIn (a common concern is that this is seen as stalking, but people publicly put stuff on their LinkedIn exactly for this reason!)
Learning these things provides you with great potential questions to ask, especially around things you have in common. Maybe you speak the same language (I’ve had impromptu chats in Russian with my interviewers before, it very much impressed them). Maybe you went to the same high school or college (Go Bruins!). Maybe they had a random internship at a super cool company (currently a recruiter, used to be at Tesla Engineering?!). Their college education often shows y’all played a similar sport, took similar classes, did similar clubs, or just did something super cool on campus that you want to ask about. Their professional journey can reveal very interesting transitions and non-linear career paths — ripe grounds for potential questions, too!
My favorite questions to prepare for the interviewer are about any major switches they had in their professional life (easy to find on LinkedIn). This can be geographic or professional — someone may have moved across the country for a new job, or pivoted to a new industry entirely. These major changes always have very interesting stories behind them, and asking your interviewer about these changes always impresses them and reflects highly on you (if you can tie in your own personal experience into the question, EVEN BETTER).
For one interviewer, I noticed he had moved from New York to Dallas for a new role (“I was looking at your LinkedIn and saw that you moved from NY to Dallas for your new job. I know some folks that moved jobs to be closer to family, was that your motivation, too?”). This started a great conversation about his family, making him smile more and more as time went on.
For another interviewer, I saw on her LinkedIn that she worked as a 5th-grade teacher for Teach 4 America, and then a project leader for Desmos. Now, she was a recruiter. Whoa! —> “I noticed on your LinkedIn that you started your career in education at Teach 4 America and Desmos before moving to recruiting. I was super curious about this, what encouraged you to pivot your career?”
That yielded a very interesting 3-minute conversation about her evolving views on work.
The key thing in these questions is that all people like talking about themselves, so take the time to brainstorm questions that make them do this.
For my BCG final-round interviews, I googled my interviewer’s name and read all ~10 articles he wrote while an MBA student at MIT. During the interview, I asked how his views around social impact consulting had evolved in the 5 years of working in the industry since he wrote the articles, and he was very clearly shocked (and impressed) by my background research and insightful questions.
Now that your preparation is done, it’s time for your actual interview. Hooray!
Make sure you’re ready to go at least 5 minutes beforehand for a remote interview (make sure to update Zoom BEFORE the interview starts!) and at least 15 minutes beforehand for an in-person interview. Assume traffic will be twice as bad as predicted to make sure you’re not late! Dress professionally. I recommend having a copy of your resume, the job listing, and your questions ready to go right in front of you. I usually had it printed out, and would reference them live if needed (the interviewers saw this positively). If the interview is in-person, make sure to bring a copy of your resume for each interviewer and your preparations printed, too.
At the start of every single behavioral interview you will ever have, you will be asked to introduce yourself. This can be phrased several different ways, but is usually called the TMAY — “Tell me about yourself”. THIS IS YOUR TIME TO LET YOUR PREPARATIONS SHINE!!!
When I was recruiting for my internships, this was the format for my TMAY that was super successful and got the interview off on the right foot immediately:
Hello [interviewer name]! My name is [name], and I’m a [school year]-student at [university name] studying [what you study] from [hometown —> this is optional, but I liked the ring of “from the Bay Area”]. At [university name], I’m involved in [what clubs or orgs you’re part of, and a brief description there], and have previously interned at [previous internship experiences]. Outside of school, I love to [3 interesting hobbies].
[Here, we are proactive, and pivot to explain why we want to work at the company and role before the interviewer even asks to show agency]
I first heard about [company you’re interviewing for] from [some cool sounding reason], and was excited to apply for the role because [why you wanted to work in the company and role, which we prepared above!]. Thanks so much again for taking the time to interview me, super excited to be here!
Yes, it seems quite long, but when practiced frequently and delivered well, it’s the perfect start to the interview! Here is my introduction for my final round interview at BCG Seattle:
Hello [interviewer name]! Thanks again for taking the time to interview me, I’m super excited to be here today.
My name is Dennis, and I’m a third-year student at UCLA studying Business Economics with a double minor in Data Science Engineering and Geology. I just happen to love rocks. At UCLA, I’m involved in The Bruin Group Consulting, a student-run startup consultancy, and have led a few projects the last 2 years. I’m also on the Club Cycling team! Previously, I was an intern at First Republic Bank in the Lending Services division and worked on the supply chain team at Kraft Heinz. Outside of school and work, I love to read science fiction, go hammocking, and catch ducks and turtles in public parks.
I first heard about consulting from my mentor in The Bruin Group, and was drawn to the industry because of its focus on problem-solving and teamwork. The Bruin Group is also where I first learned about BCG, and was super excited to apply for this internship after several great coffee chats with consultants there that were very smart, passionate about their work, and really excited to meet new people. I applied for the Seattle office specifically because I love the technology focus there and the outdoorsy culture around nature.
[this next part is completely optional and not recommended unless you’re super confident and applying for an extremely competitive internship. My friend Tatiana taught me this strategy, and the idea is to literally say three reasons why they should pick you for the internship. If delivered well, it is extremely effective and impressive, but comes off as arrogant af if performed poorly —> say this next part at your own risk!]
I know that you’ve probably interviewed many applicants for this role before, but I’m specifically a great fit because of these three reasons:
I learn extremely quickly, and can digest vast amounts of information faster than others.
I work very hard, and will not quit until the job is done.
I am super energetic and what I may not initially have in competence, I will make up with enthusiasm while I learn.
[as you can see, very risky to say these things but amazing af if done right]
Thanks so much again for your time, and I’m looking forward to chatting with you!
Wow, what an intro! That started the interview off on the right foot and helped me feel relaxed in the following case interview.
Here is what Bob’s intro looked like for his Second Order Effects interview:
Hello [interviewer name], so nice to meet you! Thanks again for taking the time to meet with me today.
My name is Bob, and I’m a third-year at UCLA studying Computer Science with a focus in Technology Management. On campus, I’m involved in a student consulting club called The Bruin Group, where we do projects for startups and non-profits in the LA area, and work as a full-stack developer at Creative Labs, where we build fun projects to make the world just a little bit better. Outside of school, I love playing tennis, weightlifting (I can confirm Bob is buff), and going on hikes.
I first heard about Second Order Effects from a friend on campus. After doing some research, I saw that you guys worked some really cool projects such as the Coco delivery robots that I see in my everyday life, especially Sawtelle (a neighborhood near UCLA with great ramen spots), a place I visit very often. Additionally, as an engineering consultancy that primarily works with robotics, I find this to be the perfect company for me to work in as it combines both my interests in engineering and business. The company is a good mix of both to build exposure in both fields, and being able to work on a team like this seems like will be similar to how I work on technical projects at school.
I am particularly interested in the business development role because it closely aligns with what I do in my personal business, where I also build connections with distributors to increase sales. The business acumen I developed in this is something I think I can leverage for this role.
Amazing job, Bob!
After the introduction, the interviewer will ask you some questions about your past experiences on your resume and some “Tell me about a time…” questions. Some very common questions that you should prepare for:
Tell me about a time you had a conflict on a team
Tell me about a time you had limited resources and had to prioritize different goals
Tell me about a time you led a team through uncertainty
What are your biggest strengths?
What are your biggest weaknesses?
What is one thing that isn’t on your resume but should be? (I talk about being an older brother here)
How did you add value to the last team you worked on?
What is your biggest accomplishment?
The key thing here is to be concise, but thorough. Make sure the stories are short and sweet initially, but that you can elaborate upon them if prompted. These need to be practiced often until they are perfected, but the beauty of it is that you can often recycle your responses to these for different interviews since all the behavioral interview questions are quite similar to each other. Regarding your professional experiences, make sure you can talk in-depth about everything that is on your resume — if it’s on the page, it’s fair game for the interviewer to ask about it!
For more examples of these questions and some strategies on how to approach answering them, I recommend looking at the resources here.
At the very end of the interview, the interviewer will ask you if you have any questions for them. THIS IS YOUR TIME TO SHINE AGAIN HOORAY!!!!!!!! We already prepared a bunch of questions above, but some other good ones to keep in your banger-interview-questions arsenal are:
What does it take to be successful here? By asking how to be successful and hearing their advice, the interviewer subconsciously wants you to succeed
How does being in [x industry or x company] affect how you view [the product that the company makes]?
This was an unexpectedly fantastic question I stumbled upon when I was randomly networking with a Disney animator one day and asked, “Does making the movies we all love remove the magic of the movies for you? Since you know exactly how these movies are made, do you still get lost in the worlds you build when you’re watching something new?” They literally said that might’ve been one of the greatest questions they’ve ever been asked about their work, and responded that no, they do still feel the magic when watching movies :)
Another example, this one for my Kraft Heinz interviewer: “Do you have a different appreciation for Mac n Cheese since you know just how complicated the supply chain for making it is?” —> The answer was yes, she enjoyed Mac n Cheese even more because she felt so much brand loyalty and deliciousness!
Last example, is this one from the Netflix CEO I met at a really cool UCLA tech conference: “Do you still enjoy watching Netflix despite knowing everything that is happening behind the scenes?” —> his super interesting answer: “I have two sides of my brain: the business side that knows the entire plot of new series months in advance through development and doesn’t care for watching TV, and the husband part of my brain that enjoys watching shows and spending time with my wife”
Again, I can’t say this enough, but having amazing questions is often the main reason you get an interview offer.
And here we are now. Wow, you made it to the end of the interview! Congratulations! You’re done, right?
WRONG
There is still one more, super super super important thing to do — thank your interviewer!
Since most interviews are remote, this comes in the form of a thank-you email, which you should send to your interviewer no later than 3 hours after the interview ends. It looks really bad if you don’t write a thank-you email (some recruiters even track which candidates do and don’t send thank-you emails), so make to sure to get yours sent!
“But Dennis, I didn’t get their email!”, you say. Well, you can often figure out what it would be by looking at the recruiter’s email address —> [first_name].[last_name]@company.com, [first_initial].[last_name]@company.com, and [first_initial].[last_name]@company.com are common ones. Worst case scenario, just email the recruiter asking for the interviewer’s email address or ask them to forward your thank-you directly.
This was my thank-you email template that worked well for me:
Subject: Thank you so much for an amazing interview!
Message:
Dear [interviewer name],
Thank you so much again for taking the time to interview me today for the [role name]. It was wonderful to meet you and learn more about your [something related to their work or career journey that you found notable]. I especially enjoyed our talk about [quirky fun thing that you and the interviewer talked about that made you memorable].
Have a great day!
Best,
Dennis Gavrilenko
If you have an in-person interview, you will want to write a handwritten thank-you note or card.
“Holy shit Dennis, that’s so extra”, you’re thinking right now.
You’re completely right — it is extra, which is exactly why we want to do it. Writing by hand a thank-you card will make you stand out so much after an interview that they will forget about all the other applicants and think you’re the greatest thing since the introduction of the In-n-Out 4x0 burger.
For one of my in-person interviews, I brought an envelope and a nice piece of paper for each interviewer I had and sat in the reception area after the interview was over to write a detailed note for each interviewer (basically the same format as the thank-you email above). I then kindly asked the receptionist to give the notes to my interviewers. One interviewer was so impressed by this that they sent me a thank-you email, for the thank-you note.
Some last tips before we part:
Interviewing is just like most things in that practice makes perfect. Your first few interviews may be very rough, but you’ll get more polished the more practice you get. If you bomb an interview, don’t worry! There are plenty more companies and roles out there.
In the unlikely event you get an offer immediately after an interview, thank them and ask for a day or two to think about it before accepting. Politely request they send over a formal offer by email.
While you’re being interviewed, you’re also interviewing the company, too. During the recruiting process, you’re building up your impression of the company (good or bad). I’ve had a few very negative interview experiences before where the interviewer didn’t turn their camera on (so I was just talking to a black screen), the recruiter took forever to respond to emails, or folks just seemed generally unprofessional when speaking with me. In those cases, I declined the next round of interviews because I decided I didn’t want to work for a company that didn’t treat their candidates courteously.
It can be very stressful to see your peers around you being super successful and landing top offers while you are not. This feeling will suck, and all I can advise you on is to focus on yourself and eventually, your own success will come (and everyone has some problem in their life, regardless of how good it appears on the outside). It’s not a race with those around you, so just keep practicing your interviews, applying for your internships, building your network, and doing your best. It’ll all work out in the end!
And so, we made it to the end of Interviewing 101! Thanks so much for reading, and see y’all soon :)
Best,
Dennis
Dennis’s Picks:
These are not related to the main article content, but I decided to start sharing some cool things I’ve been reading at the end of each new Interosity article. Enjoy!
A beautiful essay from the Founder and CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, on the potential benefits of AI
The importance of keeping in touch, by Derek Rivers. I recently discovered his personal website and it is a gold mine of great reads!
The Cube Rule for determining if something is a sandwich. Don’t really know how I found this, but I went down quite the rabbit hole with this one…
Great article Dennis. I liked how well written it was.