# New Graduates and Interns — Behavioural Interview Prep

Source: https://www.skillbyai.com/en/behavioural-interviews/l-early

> Projects, internships and learning.

## Using early-career experience

Early-career candidates are not expected to have led large initiatives. Interviewers look for **learning speed**, **curiosity**, **collaboration**, taking **initiative** within a project and handling feedback. Good sources: internships, team course projects, final-year projects, open-source contributions, hackathons, part-time jobs, clubs, volunteering and teaching assistant roles. Non-technical experiences are valid when they show the competency (resolving a disagreement in a student society shows conflict handling). Be precise about your role in group projects, and talk about what you learned from feedback, code review or a project that went badly.

## Scope grows with seniority

The same question has different strong answers for an intern, a senior engineer and a manager.

![Three ideas: new graduates and interns, mid-level to staff engineers, and engineering managers.](assets/figures/behavioural-interviews/section-6-map.svg) — Figure 6.1 — How scope, influence and examples change across levels.

## A student-project answer

Fictional, showing initiative in a team project.

```text
Q: Tell me about a time you took initiative.

S  Four-person course project: a timetable app; two weeks before the
   deadline nothing integrated.
T  I was responsible for the backend API.
A  - suggested a 15-minute daily check-in, which the group agreed to
   - wrote a shared API contract so frontend and backend could test
     independently
   - set up a simple CI job that ran our tests on every push
R  We integrated a week early and used the spare time for user
   testing with classmates; the marker highlighted our testing.
L  Agreeing interfaces early saves painful integration later.
```

## Do not apologise for your experience

Avoid starting with 'It was only a university project'. Describe it seriously; the competency is what matters.

**Quiz:** Which is a valid source of stories for a new graduate?

- [ ] Stories borrowed from a senior friend
- [ ] Only paid full-time roles
- [x] A team course project where they resolved an integration problem
- [ ] Hypothetical answers only

*Answer:* A team course project where they resolved an integration problem. Real experience at any scale counts.