<p>Any advice for those students aiming for an internship at top tech companies, inc. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.? When do most of these companies start recruiting and fill their intern positions? </p>
<p>Most of the large companies in Silicon Valley have filled summer internship positions, but some companies are still interviewing. Visit the company websites. I think Citrix, Docusign, and Stripe still have openings. Generally, most companies will start recruiting several months before the start of the internship.</p>
<p>I mean for next summer. </p>
<p>It depends on the field. Many internships in the financial sector will advertise in early fall and have filled those summer positions by December or January. Other sectors start advertising in January/February/ March for summer internships.</p>
<p>At the big tech companies, internships are basically done on a rolling basis. You can start as early as August/September for next summer. As for preparation, MIT has a great set of PDFs here (<a href=“Hacking a Google Interview”>https://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/materials.php</a>). Cracking the Coding Interview is the best book for interview prep. </p>
<p>At both the UCLA and the Caltech new student orientations, we were told that the major companies recruit at the universities at least 3 months before they need the interns. They come to the schools (Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, UCLA, USC) and hand select the students they want based on professor recommendations. </p>
<p>I ran into a former student of mine who is a ca major at UCLA and who interned at Google. She indicated that she was selected in that manner. </p>
<p>I can’t speak much for the other large tech companies (though they likely follow a similar pattern), but I know that Microsoft begins recruitment for the coming summer as early as August (so, for the next summer, they will begin recruiting in about a month). It is done on a rolling basis. In order to start the interview process with them (which is an extensive screening process of at least 5 interviews, if you make it through all the rounds), you can either talk to the reps at career fairs, apply online, or have someone refer you. It’s a good idea to get to know other students at your school that have interned at these companies, since they can send your resume directly to a recruiter, and you’re more likely to get an interview. Definitely don’t give up, even if you get rejected the first time. Most people won’t get in on their first shot. Keep reapplying as often as they allow (6 months for Microsoft).</p>
<p>I’m a current intern at Microsoft. If anyone has any questions about anything, feel free to send me a private message and I’ll be happy to answer them.</p>
<p>An0maly, those questions are pretty basic or shall we say classic.</p>
<p>@DrGoogle - I agree that the questions that were linked to are relatively “basic,” but they are actually not that far off from the kinds of questions actually asked by interviewers today. In fact, I looked at the questions in Handout 1, and the last question in that document, “Write a function to convert a string into an integer,” was exactly the same as a question that I got asked in an interview I had with Microsoft during the final round interviews (where they fly you to Redmond for a full day of 4-5 interviews).</p>
<p>Maybe some tech companies really do ask the crazy difficult puzzle and coding questions that you’ll read a lot about if you try searching for questions that are typically asked, but from my experience, the questions asked are not horribly difficult. They care more about how you approach and solve a problem and if you can ask the right questions.</p>
<p>Well, when I was working in Silicon Valley, there are two types of questions. The brain teasers were for new graduates, the normal questions were for experienced engineers. I passed the interview questions of one guy who was sort of genius because he didn’t use those brain teasers on me, if he did I’m sure I wouldn’t have passed. Also be careful not to spit out the answers too quickly, one student from UCLA with 3.8 GPA must have got some of these questions from his friends and before the interviewers had a chance to finish the question he already he blurted out the answer. We all laughed about it afterwards, of course he was not hired.</p>