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Finding an internship

Most students search for career opportunities during or after their studies in all degrees, but ECE students have an advantage in their ability to apply their learnings ahead of time through internships to succeed in their careers. Internships are extremely valuable for the experience they yield and the compensation provided in most if not all cases. When students graduate without any form of work experience (especially career-oriented or within fields they wish to pursue), it is disadvantageous as they look almost the exact same as other students while also having little to no exposure to how actual companies function. The experience of seeing how a product is taken from an idea to development, as well as the many steps involved in between, is incredibly useful to those who are looking to work immediately post-graduation. This guide is to serve as a rough guideline of what has worked best for us and many others.

Step-by-step guide

Passing the Resume Screen:

In this day and age, no HR or recruiter representative has any time to manually look through thousands if not more applications for their positions. Their solution? The ATS (Applicant Tracking System) Screener, which runs through a resume and finds unique, outstanding, or direct correlations with the job posting so that a recruiter will actually read the resume. Most individuals attempt to use pre-formatted resumes or visually-appealing ones, and while this would be perfect if each recruiter was to print out and look at resumes one by one, these resumes usually end up thrown out by ATS screening due to its formatting rules, which garbles most resumes beyond comprehension. How to get past this? 1. Use an ATS-compliant resume maker. An example would be Rezi.ai, which provides two free resumes that you may build that will output onto ATS screens properly. 2. Use the resources UIUC provides, such as VMock, to have artificial intelligence break down your resume and find fixes that are possible. 3. Have experienced individuals read over your resume to find any optimizations possible. 4. Get referrals from friends, family, or cold calls (such as reaching out to LinkedIn connections). 5. Reach out first to recruiters and keep in touch.

Online Assessments:

Most competitive positions will require some form of online assessment to further screen candidates. This assessment may be live with an engineer or in most cases just an exam of your skills. After taking around thirty to forty of these, I've realized that they break down into certain categories. Electrical Engineering assessments tend to ask a mixture of multiple-choice questions (from the most basic circuits to direct questions about say solving a scenario with FPGA's (Samsung)), and short answers, occasionally going into the creative side, looking to see how the candidate would solve a high-level EE problem with no constraints. For Computer Engineering assessments, problems vary from as simple as analyzing logic design to as complex as in-depth discussion of multi-threading architecture (Intel). For Computer Science, assessments are usually hosted on Hackerrank or CodeSignal, where problems involving data structures and algorithms will be presented to you and under a time constraint you must architect and implement a solution that passes as many test cases as possible. How to prepare for all of these assessments?

For EE assessments

  1. Use the internet, find previous example questions that companies have published on Glassdoor or on their own website.
  2. Practice analyzing circuits and walking through the breakdown of each component and its behavior within a certain circuit.
  3. Take online quizzes about concepts that relate to the topic of the job posting (if the job posting is power electronics, find quizzes covering SCR's, MOSFETs, converters, etc.)
  4. Review any weak points in class material.

For CE assessments

  1. Use the internet, find previous example questions that companies have published on Glassdoor or on their own website.
  2. Watch videos on the most common computer engineering interview questions.
  3. Review content pertaining to the job posting but also have at least a decent understanding of what components/methods are and where they would be used.
  4. Review any weak points in class material.

For CS assessments

  1. Leetcode. Begin with Blind 75, finish every single question, and understand concepts thoroughly and why each data structure/algorithm is used in each case. (If you have Leetcode Premium, you can also find questions that are most commonly asked by said company hiring, but Blind 75 is usually more than enough).
  2. Watch explanations of any problem within DSA that does not make sense after attempting it twice/thrice.
  3. Know optimization methods (manipulate your code from nested for loop to a more efficient algorithm) and know Big O notation of all common algorithms. (If possible, become well-versed in being able to derive Big O notation of the algorithm you wrote.) Solve more problems rather than more test cases if you are stuck.
  4. Review any weak points in class material.

Interview:

Almost every interview will consist of two portions, behavioral and technical. Before going further, remember that interviews are primarily an analysis of who you are, do you demonstrate enough capability, and whether or not a team wants to work with you. Your ability to communicate should be practiced, both in behavior and technical departments, which will be explained further soon. Beyond this, also keep in mind that once you are interviewing for a company, your interviewer wants you to pass, and will attempt their best to see you in a good light, so enter with confidence. Follow at least business casual for all interviews if no rules, and always attempt for business formal if possible.

Behavioral

  1. All interviews will come with a list of preparation tips. Do not ignore these. Some will mention that interviewers want you to answer questions in a certain format (STAR, for example) while others will mention information that should be implemented in your answers for maximum points here (Leadership Principles (Amazon) ).
  2. Before any interview, find another person to run mock interviews with. Online mock interview options exist, but either way, practice until it is perfect.
  3. If no tips from before, find creative ways to implement said company's mission statement or goal into your answers about the experience. (Take Rivian for an example. Had the candidate participated in say Illini Formula Electric, they could mention their involvement and their experience + passion for electric vehicles, etc.)
  4. Practice more.
  5. There are no wrong answers, so just come off as a person who their companies' teams would want to work with.

Technical

For EE
  1. All interviews will come with a list of preparation tips. Do not ignore these.
  2. Be able to break down a circuit and explain how it functions and why it would be useful in the configuration it is.
  3. Know all basic concepts of electrical engineering, especially within the field the job is located.
  4. Similar to OA, review concepts related to the job posting (if the job posting is power electronics, find quizzes covering SCR's, MOSFETs, converters, etc.)
For CE
  1. All interviews will come with a list of preparation tips. Do not ignore these.
  2. Be able to explain logic design, computer architecture, memory management, etc.
  3. Know all basic concepts of computer engineering, especially within the field the job is located.
For CS
  1. All interviews will come with a list of preparation tips. Do not ignore these.
  2. Leetcode, Blind 75, top company tagged questions.
  3. Programming languages can vary, most will accept all common DSA languages (Java, Python, C#, C/C++, or Ruby).
  4. Understand the inner workings of data structures + know their operations' runtimes as well as memory usage.
  5. Know all basic algorithms (in particular traversals, divide and conquer, breadth-first search vs. depth-first search), their limitations, and runtimes.
  6. Be able to write syntactically correct code by hand (does not need to be perfect, but mistakes like missing semicolons are all that are ignored).
  7. Know object-oriented design + be able to defend your design.

Hopefully, this guide has assisted you. Feel free to reach out to any of us on the HKN board via our .edu emails should you have any questions, and good luck with your internship search.