We Know Everything

Last Fall, I interviewed at, I'm going to call it Company W, for a second co-op. The position was for a Data Scientist co-op which, before I went in for the interview, I felt confident about. I had taken statistics in high school and was currently taking another course in college. I had also been asked to bring in a project where I had worked with 'big data' to present to my interviewers. I had just completed a project for a hackathon which I thought would be perfect. Company W was gonna be blown away.

Stat Hacks uses annual college crime statistics to create graphs to compare schools and provide statistics about the data set. The information in total came to about 4 years of about 19 statistics for 1,000 schools. Not very 'big' at all. But at the time, it felt like a massive amount as each year and school had to be scraped from an Excel document, scanned from a PDF, or manually entered (ouch...).

When I finished my presentation, one interviewer asked what language I used for statistics. Confused, I responded that I did them all by hand. She asked about R. I responded by asking, "what's R?". Red flag #1. When they found out about the size of the data set, they quietly chuckled. They asked about machine learning and modeling. I had no idea. Red flag #2. So concluded the code review portion of the interview, and it was time for the technical portion which at this point, I wasn't too psyched about.

Interviewer: You need to send an email out to customers about seasonal promotions. The content of the email are 4 boxes in a 2x2 grid. How would you decided what goes in them and what order do you put them in?

Me: What kind of information do I have about a user?

Interviewer: Any mouse click or movement a user makes on the website, we have it. We know everything.

I found that information both extremely creepy and interesting, but that interest wasn't enough to get me through the interview in one piece. I struggled through the question, and without knowledge of machine learning, I was unable to provide the response that they were looking for.

In the end, I did not get an offer from Company W, but my curiosity and excitement for what they do. Having this class under my belt when I start my third co-op, I hope to have a fighting chance next time around.