Week 3 : Women Who Code Mentorship Program 3.0
This week’s call was very fun and productive for me as I got answers to all the questions and thoughts I had during this week. This blog mainly talks about the guidance that my mentor, Mansi, provided for those questions related to DSA and some roadblocks in the journey.
Firstly I mentioned how it had been a while since I worked on a technical side project as I had been majorly focusing on DSA preparation. I wondered whether should start working on a project or continue with dsa only. To this she said that in the companies I’m aiming for, it is mostly dsa that is asked. Other technologies mentioned on the resume might also be discussed but dsa is and will remain the most significant thing to get you through your interviews. That is when I realised the level of seriousness and effort that she must have put in during her preparation, which evidently, paid off very well for her! For about two months she had worked rigorously and focused on solving dsa questions and practising for interviews.
How to proceed when stuck on a question for long
It often happened that when I wasn’t able to solve a question, I would keep thinking about it for a very long time and even get distracted in between. So for this Mansi suggests that if you are taking too long to solve the problem, it is best to look it up on the net and read about the different ways to solve it. There are many blogs and resources available that will make you understand the solution and once you do that, make sure to mark that question somewhere so that after a week or so, you can go back to it and see if you’re able to solve it now without any help. It is also a good way for revision :)
Other interview topics
Next, we talked about some topics other than dsa which could be asked in interviews like system design, dbms, etc. Now for this there isn’t a strict roadmap or resource to follow. A good way to prepare for these questions would first require you to research. Mansi suggested to reach out to people and collect the commonly asked questions from them in their interviews since these questions are sometimes repeated. Interviewing for start-ups and some small scale companies will also give you an idea of what questions to expect in these topics. You can also go through blogs or notes for a quick revision. About the other areas which you have written in your resume like web development, machine learning, etc, it will suffice to brush up on your knowledge in these a couple of days before your interview and be thorough with the related projects you’ve listed. She again asserts that above these domains, it is your knowledge in dsa and your problem solving skills which are tested, so it is only wise to focus majorly on that while preparing.
My tasks for this week are :
- To solve at least 21 dsa questions from Geeks for Geeks.
- To schedule a mock coding interview with a peer for practice
- Apply for jobs/internships
That sums up the week 3 call, hope it helped you in some way. Thank you! :D