Graduate Admissions Interview

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This page contains details on the Phone/Skype interview that is used by the department for graduate admissions.

Summary

All applicants who have a complete application for the CS MS program will be invited to have a brief Skype interview with a CS faculty member. The interview is intended to take 15-30 minutes. We use the interview to inform our decision on admission and consideration for assistantship positions. The interview includes technical questions related to data structures and algorithms, and a portion of doing some basic coding on the computer.

Standards

Admission For admission, the following is the minimum standard we are looking for: (a) can communicate clearly in English, (b) can do basic programming from scratch, (c) basic understanding of data structures and algorithms.

Assistantships For consideration for an assistantship the standards are much higher - very good programming skills, very good knowledge/mastery of data structures and algorithms.

Before the Interview

We require that you reply to the interview invitation with the following.

The Interview

We will ask you about your recent background (when was your degree finished, what major, what have you been doing since, etc.). We will ask you questions from data structures and algorithms. We will also ask you to share your Skype screen and have you do some coding on problems we ask about (possibly some of the above, possibly others).

See our Interview Evaluation Form for what we are looking for; note that there are sample questions starting on page 2.