EGSC presents to you Interview Secrets – A Software Development Engineering special. In this second edition of the Interview Secrets series, we bring to you an inside look of what hiring managers look for in candidates for SDE roles. Our panel comprises alumni at various firms in the industry , who will share with us their thoughts on how the interviewing process works alongside a sneak peek into their lives as software engineers. About the panelists: Ashley Gaia Nagel, graduated cum laude from SEAS in 2013 with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and two minors in applied math and dance. Being far too unmotivated to study for the GRE, she decided to stay at CU for grad school, joined EGSC, and graduated with an M.S. in EE in 2015. She has interned at Blue Origin near Seattle, interned at Boeing Satellite Systems in LA county, worked on GPS systems at Honeywell Aerospace just outside of Kansas City, and currently works in software automation for the RF Design team at Apple. She has recently moved from Cupertino, CA to Austin, TX, where the improved cost of living and great air quality more than makes up for the blazing hot summers, but only partially makes up for the lack of authentic Asian food. Divya Kamat, completed her Masters in Computer Science from Columbia university in Dec 2015. After graduation, she joined Microsoft in their Cloud Technology division and specifically worked on the first version of Azure Stack, Microsoft’s hybrid/ private cloud solution. After 2 years at Microsoft she moved back to New York and currently works at Squarespace on their Domains and Email team as the Team Lead and Senior Software Engineer for the past 2 years. Outside of work, she is a trained Bharatnatyam, an Indian classical dance form, dancer. Tim Reichmann, graduated from Columbia in 2013 with a B.S. in Applied Physics and later went on to obtain a B.S. in Computer Science. He now works as a full-stack software engineer at Illuminate in Washington D.C., writing software that enables users to analyze internet and cellular communication records. While he spends the lionshare of his time coding in various flavors of Javascript, he does also dabble in Java, Python, and Linux and has even been known to write user guides and film helpful demo videos. In his free time he loves to tutor high school students, hang out with friends in DC, learn/talk about economics, and study Arabic. Ziao Wang, graduated in Dec 2019 and currently works as a software engineer in Google. He is an enthusiastic programmer and learner. He is specifically interested in image/text recognition with powerful tools like distribution system, neural networks. During his study at Columbia, he majored in Computer Science and TA'd several courses like database and natural language processing. He has done some research work with Professor Gail Kaiser and Eugene Wu besides taking lectures. He also received offers from other IT companies but finally chose Google. To know more about why he did so join in for the session.