Interviews with CIS Students [Questions]

Before an interview do your research, and read a few good books on interviews, especially, learn as much as you can about the organization you are interviewing with.
Remember to ask questions about learning and career at this employer. Bring with you programs, reports, projects that you have done, perhaps in your homeworks. Go with a portfolio of accomplishments [good homeworks are accomplishments]. If possible, make some of your "products" accessible on the web.

  1. When you do an ls -l, describe in detail everything that comes up on the screen.
  2. Tell me three ways to find an IP address on a Unix box.
  3. How do you prioritize multiple projects?
  4. Tell me about your favorite class.
  5. What are differences between C++ and Java?
  6. What is your favorite programming language?
  7. In C the main program is defined as "int main(...". What is the purpose of the "int" return value?
  8. Tell me about your favorite project [with lots of follow-up questions among which - which libraries did you use?].
  9. Tell me about a something you did that was unsuccessful, a project or class that didn't go well.
  10. Do you prefer a structured or unstructured working environment.
  11. A chemist calls you up and says his Netscape isn't working. What's wrong and how do you find out?
  12. Write a bubble sort.
  13. Write a linked list.
  14. Describe an object.
  15. What are sockets?
  16. What are threads?
  17. What you think about Temple's undergraduate CIS program?
  18. Tell me about previous jobs?
  19. What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?
  20. What does object-oriented mean to you.
  21. Tell us about yourself.
  22. Where would you like to be in five years?
  23. How do you see yourself fitting in to this company?
  24. Do you have any questions for me?
  25. Can you explain what a B tree is?
  26. Why did you leave your last job.
  27. Did you finance your own education?
  28. Are you good with people?
  29. Have you experience working on a group project?
  30. How well do you know the windows menus?
  31. What was the hardest program error for you to find and correct?
  32. What did you find hardest when working with others in a project?
  33. What is a tool or system that you learned on your own? i.e. not in a class room?
  34. What's the difference between UDP and TCP?
  35. What is ICMP?
  36. What is the difference between a static and non-static field (Java)
  37. What's the difference between a stack and a Queue?
  38. Write a function and the node data structure to visit all of the nodes in a binary tree.
  39. Do you know anything about the protection rings in the PC architecture?
  40. How much hardware/Assembler/Computer Architecture experience do you have.
  41. They were very intersted in any complex parsing projects I had done. Decoding the TCP/IP packet, the web worm, etc.
  42. They wanted to feel that I really enjoy programming, etc.
  43. They were interested in the MFC/ 3D and 2D work that I was doing on my own.
  44. Talk about one problem you had and the ways in which you resolved it.
  45. Talk about an event in which you were analytical.
  46. Would you want to be in a management position?
  47. What is your proudest achievement so far?
  48. If you have to describe yourself in one word, what would it be?
  49. What does software quality mean to you?
  50. What are the three basic principles of Object Oriented Programming?
  51. What is the purpose of "union" in C?
  52. What is embedded software?

Please send interview questions to ingargiola@cis.temple.edu. Other students may learn from them.