Honing résumés and mock interviews lead to co-ops

Muhammad Rafikov, a second-year computer science student, is heading to the Spring University-Wide Career Fair on the lookout for his second co-op. During this search, he plans to bring along everything he learned from his first internship last summer at Google.

Like many undergraduate RIT students, Rafikov is in a degree program that requires multiple blocks of cooperative education, or co-op. Each paid work experience is related to the student’s field of study and typically lasts one semester.

Ever since he took a high school trip to the New York City Google headquarters, Rafikov has wanted to work at Google. At RIT, he became an event coordinator with the Google Developer Student Club and began honing his résumé.

He applied to Google and was contacted for follow-up interviews, including a technical screening test called an Online Assessment (OA). He remembers spending every minute studying Data Structure and Algorithm (DSA) questions and LeetCode.

“I also reached to one of my software development professors, Robert St Jacques, to do a mock interview—and he was more than happy to help,” said Rafikov, who is from Brooklyn, N.Y. “He said that if I’m stuck on a problem to think of the edge and base cases first—the things that will obviously work and not work—and then do the complicated stuff.”

St Jacques, principal lecturer of software engineering, worked in industry and as a hiring manager for many years. He said that just like with sports or music, practice is key to programming from scratch.

“Muhammad came to me with topics he thought he was weak in and I posed problems in those areas and gave feedback,” said St Jacques. “It’s important to have a dialogue during an interview—even an OA—and don’t make the interviewer guess what you’re doing or thinking.”

Rafikov added, “If you articulate yourself during the interview—even if you know you’re wrong, maybe you’ll help yourself or they’ll nudge you in the right direction. Interviewers are people too and they want to see you succeed. Say what you are thinking, so they know that you know your stuff.”

Rafikov said that whenever his phone rings, he has a habit of declining the call. When Google called three weeks after his interviews, he declined the call and panicked when he couldn’t call them back. Luckily, he answered the phone when Google called him back the next day.

In Mountain View, Calif., Rafikov was an associate software engineering intern with the YouTube TV access team and worked on a new eligibility ID system. During the summer co-op, he enjoyed biking around the Google campus and even got to work one week at the Google offices in New York City.

“Personally, it was one of the most fulfilling periods of my life as I was surrounded with like-minded and brilliant colleagues at the top of their field and given meaningful work that had lasting stakes for the wider team,” said Rafikov. “I also happened to learn a lot from my roommates, who were working for Nvidia.”