Internship interviews are not scaled-down senior interviews. Interviewers know you have little experience, so they are testing your reasoning process and your honesty rather than your recall.
The three things being assessed
- Reasoning: can you work through an unfamiliar problem out loud without freezing?
- Verification: is the skill on your resume actually yours?
- Communication: can you explain something technical to someone who was not there?
Prepare your projects properly
Every project on your resume should have a three-minute version and a fifteen-minute version. Expect to be asked why you made a specific decision, and what you would do differently.
- What problem the project solved and who for
- One decision you made and the alternative you rejected
- One thing that went wrong and how you diagnosed it
- What you would change if you rebuilt it now
Practice thinking out loud
Silence is the most common failure in a technical interview. The interviewer cannot assess reasoning they cannot hear. Narrate your assumptions, state what you would check first, and say when you are guessing.
How to say you do not know
Not knowing is expected. Bluffing is disqualifying, because it tells the interviewer you might bluff during an incident too.
I have not worked with that. Based on what I know about how the surrounding pieces behave, I would expect it to work roughly like this, and the first thing I would check is whether that assumption holds.
Questions worth asking them
- What does a typical week look like for an intern on this team?
- How is my work reviewed, and how often?
- What does a successful internship look like at week twelve?
- What is the most common reason interns struggle here?
The week before
- Reread your own project code or configuration, you have forgotten more than you think
- Do one timed practice problem out loud, recorded, and watch it back
- Write your three-minute project summaries down and say them to another person
- Test your camera, microphone and internet connection on the actual platform
Where to go next
Data Center and Automation Internship
The advanced track: spine-leaf and VXLAN, AWS hybrid cloud, then Python, Ansible, REST APIs and CI/CD on top, with real automation projects.
View internshipEnterprise Networking Internship
The enterprise route: routing and switching through CCNP level, wireless, firewall, hybrid cloud and the monitoring and ticketing work an operations role actually runs on.
View internship