And Finally, The Last One .. Fourth interview [3/4/2011]

Getting the email asking to schedule a fourth and final phone interview was more than I could have asked for.  I set this one up, unfortunately, during an exam week.  I think it went well.

I was really excited after my fourth interview.  I had prepared for my third interview more than any other and I felt that there wasn't much I could do for the fourth one.  I realized that preparing for interviews, coding wise, does not help.  They will ask you questions that you will have learned in school or be able to derive from your current knowledge, not ones that will be able to be presented by Google searches, believe me.  Of course, you can find the answers after the fact because you know what to look for.

In my last interview I was lucky to be asked to implement a queue using an array.  Being a computer science tutor and having taken data structures prepared me well for this.  Pointers were all over my initial solution but then I changed them to indices.  Before having to write complete code to implement a queue and handle all of the necessary edge cases, I talked a little bit about backtracking and approximation algorithms.  I did not have to code these, more just general information about projects I've worked on dealing with these algorithms.