I just wanted to make a quick post discussing how I got an offer from Google this summer. The internship program that I'm going to be part of is called STEP.
So normally people tend to study a lot for this kind of interviews. I have discussed this with some of my friends and the popular advice online is to roughly study around a month and grind on a lot on problems from Leetcode.
The only problem was, that I did not have a lot of time. I basically got the offer to do the interview go directly into my spam, so I had to device a plan and go through all of the Leetcode grind in less than a week.
I ended up studying roughly three to four hours a day through a series of the classical algorithms and compressing on some information.
The following is a table of all of the things that I studied before the interview:
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Interview Day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create a Stack from scratch | Quick Sort | Trees (Implement a binary tree and BST) | Not stress and wait for the best |
| Merge Sort | Trees (find height of a tree and simmetry) | Prep interview with a friend | |
| Create a Queue from scratch | Prep interview with a friend | Create a Linked List from scratch | |
| Tree Traversal: inorder, preorder, postorder and BFS |
I didn't think that the interviewers were really harsh. On the contrary, they were really cheering me to program my ideas. And the problems were not impossible compared to some of the horror stories of impossible problems I heard.
In conclusion I think I'm really excited for the future and I will make another entry when I end the internship. For now I think I am really excited to learn.