Personal Narrative: Key Aspects

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Do curso por University of California San Diego

Mastering the Software Engineering Interview

426 classificações

University of California San Diego

Mastering the Software Engineering Interview

426 classificações

Curso 4 de 5 em Specialization Programação Java: Design Orientado a Objetos de Estruturas de Dados

You’ve hit a major milestone as a computer scientist and are becoming a capable programmer. You now know how to solve problems, write algorithms, and analyze solutions; and you have a wealth of tools (like data structures) at your disposal. You may now be ready for an internship or (possibly) an entry-level software engineering job. But can you land the internship/job? It depends in part on how well you can solve new technical problems and communicate during interviews. How can you get better at this? Practice! With the support of Google’s recruiting and engineering teams we’ve provided tips, examples, and practice opportunities in this course that may help you with a number of tech companies. We’ll assist you to organize into teams to practice. Lastly, we’ll give you basic job search advice, and tips for succeeding once you’re on the job.

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Explaining what you've already done

This week, we’re going to focus on how to speak about your experiences working on projects and how to speak about the technical problems you’ve experienced and how you’ve solved those problems. We’ll introduce the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Results) model for presenting your work, and discuss how to and how not to present the problem you worked on and the solution you developed. We’ll also discuss the communication skills that are critical to this task. It’s a fun week with lots of examples (both good and bad), which ends with an assignment where you will present your own work on video and submit this video for peer review.

Welcome and Introduction to Personal Narrative2:32

Sample Pitch, Broadly Technical4:56

Sample Pitch, Non-Technical5:28

Sample Pitch, Technical5:41

Personal Narrative: Key Aspects4:04

Conheça os instrutores

Mia Minnes
Assistant Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Leo Porter
Assistant Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Christine Alvarado
Associate Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering

[MUSIC]

All right, so you've seen us presenting some technical solutions.

And hopefully we've made it look pretty easy.

But it turns out, it takes a lot of practice.

So, what we're going to do for the rest of this week.

Is we're going to give you the skills to practice your own technical explanations.

And we're going to do a lot of practice.

Talk about some common pitfalls and how you can recover from those pitfalls.

In this video in particular, we're going to look at some evaluation criteria.

What are the people who are watching you,

who are interviewing you, really looking for in these videos?

And we're going to use this evaluation criteria as a frame work throughout

the rest of the week.

So, what are they looking for when they ask you to present or

talk about some work that you've done?

Are they looking to see whether you're a genius?

That you're the next big thing?

That you've got the next idea that's going to turn into a company as big as Google,

and revolutionize the world?

Well no, of course they're not looking for that.

They're looking just to see that you are a competent

person who is good at solving problems.

They want to know about your thought process.

And they want to know about your communication skills.

So, they want to know, did you solve an interesting problem and

can you communicate it.

What was your solution?

Was it novel?

Was it interesting?

So all of this, as you saw in our examples, can be made to look pretty easy.

But as I mentioned before, it's really difficult and

it takes a lot of practice to develop a good explanation.

So, let's take a look at how you can approach this problem.

And then in particular let's frame it around how you're going to be evaluated

on this task.

So, you can avoid some common pitfalls in this process.

So, the approach that you may have seen online.

That's kind of all over the place is that when you're presenting this technical work

you'll use something called the STAR method.

So, this is a very nice approach to presenting your work, and

STAR is an acronym.

It stands for situation, task, action, and result, so STAR.

So in this situation part, you want to talk about

what was the situation in which you were solving a problem?

Who was involved?

What is the sort of context of the problem you were trying to solve?

Then you'll go on to the task.

So, what was exactly the problem you were trying to solve?

Why should people really care about it?

Then you can go on to the action.

What was the solution that you presented?

What did you actually do?

And then, of course, what was the result?

Did it actually solve the problem?

How did you know?

How do you know?

So, all of these pieces need to be present in your technical explanation.

What we're going to do in this week is, we're going to take the STAR model.

And we're going to group it a little bit differently.

So, we can really get at some of the real challenges

to developing this technical presentation.

And talk about some of the common pitfalls that we see.

So, what we're going to do, is divide this into three lessons.

Where first, we focus on the problem, so pitching the problem.

How do you effectively pitch and problem and it's context so

that the people you're talking to will care about your problem and

see that you know why that problem is important?

And this roughly corresponds to the S and the T, the situation and

the task portion of that star model.

In the next lesson, we'll talk about the solution.

So, what was your technical solution?

Why did it solve the problem?

Why was it innovative and creative?

That piece roughly corresponds to the A and R, the Action and the Result.

And then in the last part, we'll talk about technical communication and

group work skills, more of these soft skills.

Now, these soft skills aren't explicitly mentioned in the star model.

But obviously, they're going to be a critical piece

of your technical explanation in an interview situation.

So, throughout the week, we'll look at each of these components.

And we'll be giving you some examples of some good examples.

As well as some pitfalls and some bad examples.

To show you what to avoid and how to avoid making these same mistakes.

So, we're looking forward to getting started.

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