Learning from Failures and Achievements
My Interviews from Pennsylvania and Cambridge Universities to Disney and Google
Over the years, I’ve had the chance to interview for different roles, from student assistant (HiWi) and internships to full-time positions in various companies and research groups.
Whether I walked away with an offer or a rejection, I’ve always tried to learn something from every single one of them. After all, an interview isn’t just a test; it’s a great chance to chat with the people actually doing the work, hear about the real problems they are trying to solve, and get a feel for their team culture.
Here, I’d like to share my takeaways and write what I learnt as every interivew, especially the rejections, truly taught me something to improve myself for whatever came next.
(Just a quick heads-up: Some companies explicitly ask candidates not to disclose sensitive data or the problems they are working on. To respect those professional boundaries, I won’t be sharing any confidential data or exact questions here. I’ll just be focusing on general themes, high-level topics, and my personal learning experiences!)
I plan to treat this as a living document, so I’ll be updating it regularly as I go through new interviews.
Date: 2025 Q4
Status: Rejected
The whole interview process seems to be a long run, consists of 5-7 rounds of interview, depending on the position. That is tough! But it all starts with an interview with hiring manager.
I really liked the position and it was highly related to my topics. So, I got so nervous during the interview and instead of allowing the manager to conduct the interview and ask their potential questions, I tried to over-present my prior works and experiences. I dived too much into some details that was not even necessary, and were actually proper for a technical interview with engineers/researchers!
A key factor is remain calm during the interview and allow them to direct the meeting, despite your burning passion for the position and topic. I didn’t have so much prior experience for hiring manager for full-time jobs, and I could notice it’s really different than hiring manager interviews for internship and HiWi positions.
Location: UK
Date: 2025 Q4
Status: Offer Received, but had to Decline.
(to be written soon)
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
Date: 2025 Q1
Status: Offer Accepted.
(to be written soon)
Date: 2025 Q1
Status: Passed Technical Interview, Rejected Final Interview for Timeline
Google interviews would differ from team to team. Mine had 2 stages: technical and matching interviews. Even though Google is famous for its challenging technical interviews, I could succesfully pass this stage and led to final interview with hiring manager, where we discussed timeline and required stages for joining the team. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make this stage passed as we saw difficulties in timeline and scheduling, considering that work permit in Switzerland needed some months for non-EU students (yeah, place of birth can still play a negative role in these stuff and that’s frustrating!)
What I learnt from Technical Interview:
1- Perfectly know and review your prior works. You should be able to talk deeply technical about every single experience or paper listed on you CV.
2- Expect to talk about your prior projects or papers to a reviewer. They asked me to elaborate on one of my projects and papers, and during my presentation, the interviewer started to ask brutal questions about various aspects of the work, quite similar to a reviewer reviewing your papers.
3- Some keywords can be enough to fully answer their questions. I was asked that what would happen if we feed an image into the presented network in some other shapes and my efforts on elaboration didn’t satisfy the interview. However, at the end, once I said that “all of them would leed to increased loss value”, he was perfectly satisfied. So “increased loss value” was the key term.
What I learnt from Matching Interview (with hiring manager):
1- Good to learn most about the team culture and their expectations.
2- Have a clear timeline from your future and discuss potential delays coming from work permit.
3- Be relaxed, there is no technical question but there is technical impression as you may briefly discuss some high-level solutions for the project.
Location: Philadelphia, USA
Date: 2024 Q4
Status: Offer Received, but had to Decline.
(to be written soon)
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Date: 2024 Q2
Status: Offer Accepted.
(to be written soon)
Some General Tips:
- Just be yourself! Pretending to be someone fitting in a team (in a fake way) or trying to please the interviewers usually led to negative results. Being yourself helps to be realistic about your expectations, questions, and honest with your answers to interviewers. The best and most effective interviewes for me were the ones that I was purely myself, confident in my works, and far from unrealistic presentation.
- Educate yourself about the depth of questions and topics for each round of interview. Recruiters and HR business partners are usually your best assests at this point as they can guide you about the topics in coming interview.
- For presenting your works, mark a highly-technical work (one that contains sophisticated details and technical contribution), mark a highly-effective work (one that brought value to the company), and mark 2 highly-related projects to the advertised position (those that have shared background and use similar tools).