This post was originally written in november 2016 and recovered from my old blog
This is my final year at university as Software Engineer Student and we need to complete at least 120 hours working in a company as a part of one of the 'subjects'.
The process starts with a list of offering companies and every student enrolled in the course choose several options in order of preference. Then the course staff start to sort by average grade mainly the students. The output of this process is a list of students who should contact the respective companies to start the process.
Well, so my first company choice was CSC, a very large company located in Avilés (also Barcelona, Madrid, etc). I contacted the human resources person who was responsible of the agreement with my university and sent her the english version of my resumé. After a couple of weeks I received a call asking me to go to their offices in Avilés next day. I accepted to be there at mid-morning to realize the internship interview.
The interview
I arrived at their offices a little bit early because I try to follow the rule '5 Minutes early is on time; on time is late; late is unacceptable.' I had to sign a sort of contract to enter the building and keep in view the visitor's accreditation that I was given.
After a few minutes two men, one from Spain and one foreigner, came and introduce themselves. They were part of the IT systems department of the company. All of us went to a meeting room where they started asking me some questions about my CV (they'd printed it and underline the parts they were more interested in). When we finished talking two of the DevOps engineers of the company and one of the development department entered the room and introduced themselves. They asked me kind of the same things that the other team and some questions about their respective job tasks, like if I was familiar with some of the concepts. We also talked about some of the technologies the company use in daily task and a little about how things work there. I explained them why I think university is a little obsolete and the disconnection that exists between the institution and the real-world companies. We also talked about some of my hobbies, what project I was working on for my final course between others.
I wouldn't like to finish without adding I felt really comfortable talking with all of these people, specially because they were actual workers of the company and I had the opportunity to ask them some technical questions related to the task I would be doing. In fact it was more like a relaxed conversation between engineers who like working on what they do. All of this process was realized in Spanish and English to test my conversational skills . I didn't wanted to fool anybody about my english level and I liked the idea to talk a little in the Shakespeare's language even though I'm not the best english speaker xD
UPDATE: Today I received a call from CSC's human resources department telling me I was one of the selected candidates. Hooray!