Tips for technical interviews

Written by Dr. Siva Kumar, Futurica Petrochemicals (April 1998)

To

Prof. Kesava Rao
Chairman, Chemical Engineering
IISc Bangalore 560 012.


Dear Sir,

Thank you for your letter. It would be a very good idea to conduct mock
interviews for the interested students.  It should be brought to their
notice that a clear mind, which knows whatever little it knows very well,
is appreciated a lot more than a jack of all arts. I have a few
suggestions which might be useful. I have had very little experience in
conducting interviews, so please realise this limitation when you go
through them.

Usually the interview (technical) would start with questions relating to
the project.  A very brief presentation of the work in 5 minutes (not
exceeding 10 minutes at any rate) will have to be given by the student.  I
found that they falter at this stage very badly.  Here the idea should be
to express an idea than to impress the interviewer. Students usually go
tangentially during this phase and talk lot more than required without
making any impression. Details, equations etc. should be kept out.  They
should not drop too much jargon.  Usually the interviewer does not belong
to the same field as the student's.  So jargon results in a bad
communication.  If the interviewer has patience he might go on to details,
but here again time will be wasted in explaining terms.

What will be sought to be known at this stage is, what are the techniques
the student knows (experimental, or numerical if the project is
computational), what kind of efforts went into understanding the problem,
how good is the clarity of expression and idea of the person, etc.  So
this step is the most crucial. It would be better if the students practise
it a lot. 

Apart from all other types of questions, one standard query will be about
the subject of interest of the student.  It is a must that the student
chooses some subject and prepares well in it. The reason for this is to
see how well the person knows about the subject he is actually interested
in. 

I hope this would help you to train the students well for interviews.

With regards,
Siva Kumar.