I am an undergraduate in a 211 of the Imperial Capital. My major is a cross-discipline of EE and CS. I want to pursue a CS direction at the graduate level. I have received the recommendation letter from the graduate students who teach in the School of Computer Science, Hong Kong University. Say it in advance, it is no different from firm offer), so I will give some interview experience to students who want to apply for this program of HKU in the future.
I was fortunate enough to participate in early admission, that is, the professor in the college came to our school in advance to recruit students independently, and gave an informal offer. The School of Computer Science has 4 taught graduate programs, so only 8 applicants for each program can participate in this interview. The selection criteria are probably your GPA, IELTS TOEFL score, and resume. The form of Early Admission is face to face meeting, which lasts for one hour and communicates in English throughout. The content of the interview is basically as follows, for reference only:
- What is your opinion on self driving or intelligence driving? Give you more than ten seconds to think, and then answer in English, and basically check your oral English and logical thinking. Then the professor will ask questions based on your answers.
- Investigate problems in probability theory and algebra.
- Handwritten code questions, test algorithms. There is an input N, your block of codes is able to tell whether this is a'fourth root' number, and returns TRUE if it is and FALSE otherwise. Need more questions.
- If you are offered an offer, will you go?
- QA section.
They will email you the interview status within two weeks.
Later, I went to participate in their written test + the second round of interviews (this should be a new gameplay this year, it was just an interview before), and the location was in a five-star hotel. After you go in and sit down, you will be issued papers:
- Algorithmic questions, classic step-by-step questions (you can go to Leetcode or GitHub to have a look, there are ideas and answers to the problem), the investigation is recursion.
- Language questions, using python and C to examine the output of a piece of code. Python tests the scope of global and local variable, C tests swap() and pointer.
- Probability questions, test permutations and combinations.
- Algebra questions, test integrals for derivation.
- The financial problem is the calculation of bank deposits and withdrawals and interest rates. It involves compound interest and simple interest.
After the written test, take the paper for the next interview. The content of the interview is very different from that of early admission. They will give oral questions, let you modify the algorithmic questions on the paper, and get another output result, and then share your views and practices with everyone present, and communicate in English throughout the process. This interview session is basically discussing the topic just written, and there is no longer a chance to introduce myself and express my thoughts.
After the two sessions are over, they will give you news within 4 weeks. The results of the written test and interview have little effect on the overall judgment, that is, they will still combine your GPA and English scores to make the choice of offer holders. But in general, a positive speaking + fluent English + good-looking GPA are the basic qualities of becoming an offer holder.
After four weeks, I successfully got the research letter. The original intention of writing these interviews is to thank the online seniors and sisters for the interviews from previous years, and the other is to save character for applications from other schools. Nowadays, there is fierce competition in the computer field. There are too many people from all walks of life who want to jump to the computer field, so I want to leave some experience for later reference.