Interviewing at Hackbright by Katherine

Katherine, who asked questions pre-interview, sent me these synopses of her experience. She is now in the midst of the good craziness of Hackbright!

David didn't ask any technical questions, more about my background and why Hackbright in particular.

My interview with Christian was scheduled for 15 minutes but was in total around 30 minutes, though part of that was technical difficulties (I should've just had it with me but there was an echo in the room so I had to run back to my desk to grab my headset). He actually started off with some of the similar non-coding questions that David had had, basically around what brought me to this point of being interested in Hackbright. I think they're really focused on making sure that the personality dynamics will work for the class and go towards building up the community of Hackbright grads, and as an applicant you want to see if this program will be a good fit for yourself as well, which is something that I forget a bit about sometimes when I get nervous about interviews.

The part that was a bit different from David's was that Christian went through the optional coding question on the application about how to write a function to get the multiples of a number in a certain range, which I had taken a stab at for theoretically how I might do it but didn't actually write any code. He shared what he thought was the optimal solution and walked me through it, so I think here this was a sort of mini-test of what his teaching style is like against what your style of learning is. Ultimately while I know I have certain tics I need to keep an eye in during an interview situation (if it's not an in-person interview, I'll pretty much always put up a post-it note somewhere to remind myself to SLOW. DOWN.), you should fall back on the general advice of being yourself, because I figure if you can't be yourself in two 15-minute interviews, it would probably be a lot harder to get through 10 intensive weeks.