Internship and final-year project interviews

For most students, the internship or final-year project interview is the first real interview of their life. It is not a thesis defence, and it is not a normal job interview either.

A defence judges finished work. An internship interview judges what you will become over six months inside their team. Those are different questions, and most candidates answer the wrong one.

What the company is actually looking for

A supervisor who takes on an intern is signing up for months of their own time. They are weighing three things, in this order.

Will you cost me more than you bring? That is the real question behind everything else. An intern who is self-sufficient after three weeks is a gain; one who has to be unblocked daily is a cost.

Do you understand what you have already built? Hence the question that always lands, about your previous project — coursework, a side project, a summer internship. They are not grading the project. They are testing whether you can explain a technical choice you made yourself.

Will you last six months on one subject? A final-year project is not a sprint. Companies have been burned by candidates who were brilliant in the interview and had checked out by March.

"Tell me about your project"

It arrives in the first three minutes. Budget ninety seconds, not ten minutes.

The structure that works: the problem, what you built, the technical decision you are most confident about, the result. One sentence each.

"Field agents had to record readings with no connection. I built a mobile app that stores locally and syncs when the network comes back. The hard part was resolving conflicts when two agents edit the same record — I timestamped on the client and arbitrated on the server. Re-keying went from two days to none."

Then stop talking. The rest of the interview is built on what they choose to dig into, and that choice tells you what they care about.

The technical depth is where it is decided

This is the part international guides do not prepare you for, because elsewhere an internship is negotiated on the CV. Here they open the bonnet.

Expect: why this technology and not another, what did not work, what you would do differently, and — the most feared — show me some of the code.

Three rules.

Know your own code. If you copied a section without understanding it, do not lead with it. A supervisor finds the line you cannot explain in two questions, and from that point they doubt everything else.

Have a real answer to "what broke". A project with no difficulty is a project nobody believes. Tell them about the bug that took you three days and how you found it — it is the best evidence of self-sufficiency you can offer.

Say "I don't know" properly. "I don't know, but I would start by looking at X" is worth far more than an invention. They are hiring an intern, not an expert; they reject people who bluff.

The questions specific to an internship

"What are your dates, and how long does your school require?" Know them cold: the earliest start, the required duration, whether the paperwork is ready. A candidate who has to check looks unserious.

"Are you talking to other companies?" Answer honestly without giving numbers. "Yes, two others, but this subject is the closest to what I want to do" is a good answer.

"What do you want to learn here?" The one question where a vague answer eliminates you. Name a specific skill, and connect it to what they actually do.

"Would you want to stay afterwards?" Many companies recruit their juniors from their interns. If that is your intention, say so.

What loses the place

Reciting the report. A defence panel wants completeness; a company wants selection.

Blaming the supervisor, the team or the subject. It is the single most negative signal in the whole interview.

Turning up without having read what the company does. Ten minutes on their site is enough, and the absence of those ten minutes is immediately visible.

Asking nothing at the end. Ask what the subject would be, who supervises, how the team works.

Practising the actual exercise

The hard thing to arrange alone is being questioned about your own project by someone who knows nothing about it — and who will then tell you honestly what was unclear.

That is exactly what Talk2Hire does: the interview is about your background and your project, in the language of the internship you are aiming at, and on the plans that include a live session you are facing a recruiter who reads these applications all year.

Read next: what changes when you interview in Tunisia and the STAR method.