Graduation Project Walkthrough

What they ask

The first interview is online with HR and it is mostly about you: introduce yourself, talk about your current job or internships, and walk through your graduation project in detail. The same project comes up again in the technical round, so the way you tell the story matters twice.

Typical prompts:

• What was the goal of your graduation project, and what was your personal contribution versus the team's?
• What went wrong and how did you fix it?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses? Give an example of each.
• What did you learn in your last internship that you would apply here?
• What is your GPA, and how do you keep learning new technologies?

What they look for

• A project story with a clear problem, your specific role, one technical decision you made and its consequence, and a measurable result.
• Self-awareness in the strengths and weaknesses answer. A weakness that you have a plan for is fine; a fake weakness is not.
• Signals of eagerness to learn, because a large part of the first year is product training.
• Consistency between the HR version and the technical version of your story. Interviewers compare notes.

Tip

Prepare a two-minute and a five-minute version of the project. HR gets the short one; the manager will pull on the threads and ask for the long one.