Interviewing tips Part I(for UWF students)

Ok, this is part one of a sequence of blogs that are directly correlated to help UWF students get jobs at the top tech companies in the nation, and even, the world. There has been a lot of hype that UWF students just end up at Harris Corporation or at Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR), and can't do any better. This blog (out of many) will help enlighten that false prophecy of where a UWF CS graduate *can* end up.

The blog concentrates on the courses that actually help the UWF graduate prepare for interviews. Of course, one needs to worry about the items in their resume. Be it true or not, you need to know what's on your resume and how to elaborate on the selected items during the interview. (Since that is all the interviewer has to go off in bringing you in for an interview in the first place) In any event, the first part is to know the in's and out's of your resume.

Foretelling what the interview questions are highly unlikely, but there are a couple things to consider and which courses will help in aiding the student to get passing marks in the interview. The questions for a top company will generally come from questions regarding OOP, syntax/coding, OOP-implementation in a certain language, datastructures, algorithms, and system programming-specific concepts. The language of choice is almost always C or C++. However, if the questions regarding OOP and OOP-implementation tend to crop up, then it's a viable choice between C++ and Java. Otherwise, you'd best stick to C and C++ to do well on the interview.

Given that information, the courses that are most pertinent for the UWF student are as follows:
DataStructures and Algorithms
Analysis of Algorithms
Intermediate Programming
Operating Systems


That's about it -- just four courses that need to be studied. However, that ends up being a lot of material to be familiar with. I will break down the essentials that need to be taken from the courses:
Intermediate Programming - OOP concepts, how to implement OOP concepts, differences in other languages (i.e., Java vs C++ with regards to inheritance)

Operating Systems - system programming concepts - threads, process, PCB, synchronization, IPC, thread scheduling, library vs kernel threads, as well as the dining philosophers problem.

Datastructures - various datastructures, problem sovling capability, and time complexity.

Analysis of Algorithms - time complexity, memoization, greedy algorithms, and the infamous TSP.

Here's a short list of the actual concepts that *someone* has studied that got that *someone* passed many interviews:
OOP - inhertiance, virtual functions, pure virtual functions, abstract class vs interface, multiple inheritance, virtual function implementation (C++), and polymorphism (what it means to be polymorphic as well as examples to show polymorphic behavior)

Threads - Kernel vs Library, communication between threads - mutex/semaphores, thread synchronization - CS (critical section), and the dining philosopher problem.

Algorithms/Datastructures - everything about linked list and tree structures. (The complexity for algorithms with trees is almost always O(n*log(n)) with the log(n) as being the key feature to go from top->bottom of a tree) "Know your time complexity of the algorithms"

any comments on what else should be studied throughout the UWF course curriculum? :)
Next blog will cover some specific concepts in C that should be known.
(Hint: pointers are evil)