The second week of WWCD mentorship program was kind of a turning point for me.
It was
1. A personal change for me
2. A technical interview experience
Apart from the technical help, my mentor helped me this time something unusual but maybe common among students. The idea was - lack of confidence.
For me, communicating in a group of people takes courage and I hardly can express my ideas or my views when in a group. This reason made me feel inferior and also, made me dread the meetings we have every week with our mentor. Upon telling my mentor that I faced this, she was kind enough to help me over come this and told me these things which I think might help you too !
1. Try and participate in college communities which help in your growth and networking.
2. Try and connect with more and more people and talk to them because it is important to build a network !
3. Do not fear what others might think because at the end of the day, you’re just trying and you will get better !

Now coming on to technical interviews .
My mentor conducted a 30 min interview to tell us how the things actually work.
Here's the flow :
1. My mentor Riddhi Gupta asked a 1 line introduction then gave me a Google Doc link ( yes you need to code in Google Doc ).
2. She then wrote a question on Google Doc and asked me to think for solution and explain it.
3. I came up with 2 solutions and she asked me to explain the time complexities of both of my solution and then asked me to code the second solution.
4. As I started coding she pointed out 2 things I did wrong - a. You always write proper names for variables and functions which are suitable and b. When asked to code a function, you need to return a value and do not make it return type as void.
5. As I started coding, she helped me in between where I got stuck and then gave me a test case to run the code on.
6. My code was a little buggy and hence she asked me to fix it by providing a hint.
7. Upon successful completion , this was the feedback and tips :

1. You always make sure you are familiar with time complexities .
2. You always write clean, properly named code
3. You always should explain each and every step whatever you are writing.
4. You always first discuss the solution with the interviewer before coding and when they give you green pass, you code it !

Overall this interview experience was amazing and enlightening. At the end of the interview, I felt pretty amazing because we had the talk about my dear of speaking out too and this was something which instilled in me a confidence to improve.

Hope you like this blog ! Ready for the next week of WWCD!