Interview Coach
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Interview Coach
To become an Interview Coach, please email valerie@adadevelopersacademy.org
As an Interview Coach, you will provide practice interviews and feedback to students practicing their interviewing skills.
Your role will be to:
- know your audience is a group of women, and gender diverse folks who are new to coding--students began their cohort with very little to no experience coding; Ada provides them with 6 months of intensive classroom experience in Ruby, Rails, HTML/CSS, and JS followed by a 5 month industry internship; please define terms, do not assume that they know something already, and do not refer to concepts as something that "programmers should already know", as something that "you can't get a job if you don't understand", or as “easy”. Things that are easy to you may be difficult to someone else, and trivializing them trivializes a person who struggles with them.
- encourage and support students, as this is a learning process for them to help prepare them for actual interviews
- ask students interview questions to allow them to practice their interviewing skills
- provide feedback to students on what went well and what could be improved upon
What to expect
- You give us your availability and we will send a calendar invite for a time slot
- When you get to the location, we will have a room for a 1-1, hopefully with a whiteboard available (if not, we will provide paper)
- Students will not bring their laptops with them unless you ask us to request that ahead of time
- Students will be nervous (who isn't in an interview?!)
- Students are looking for constructive, helpful feedback to improve their interviewing skills. This is a learning activity for them!
- You choose your own questions to ask and provide feedback at the end
Time Commitment
- we will send out a separate timetable with available spots, but our mock interviews are generally in the afternoons around 1-5pm.
| Mock Interviews for Internships | Mock Interviews for Full Time positions |
|---|---|
These practice interviews will be 30 minute blocks consisting of:
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These practice interviews will be 1 hour blocks consisting of:
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Tips for being a ROCKSTAR Mock Interviewer
- Understand the Ada Curriculum (see below)
- Do not "well, actually" your interviewee, instead let them complete their thoughts and hold your feedback until the feedback phase of the interview
- Do not look at your phone instead of your interviewee
- Stay on schedule! - make sure that all students feel like they got the same energy and time as their peers
About the Ada Curriculum
- Students learn Ruby (~5 weeks), HTML/CSS (~2 weeks), Rails (~5 weeks), API Interactions (~3 weeks), JS (~4 weeks), as well as Agile, TDD< and CS Fundamentals (spread out throughout curriculum).
- During the classroom learning, students code A LOT. Ada's curriculum is based on building practical coding skills and teaching students how to learn rather than focusing on theoreticals. Coding hours accumulate to ~30+ per week, on top of Lectures, Guest Lectures, Networking Events, etc
- check out the classroom curriculum --> Cohort Schedule
- know what Ada Graduate Learning Goals --> Ada Graduate Profile
Choosing your Interview Questions You may ask any questions that you like, especially if you have some particular questions that you like to ask; but please consider the following information when picking your questions to make sure that you have an understanding of where our students are and what they have learned.
| Example Questions to Ask | Example Questions NOT to Ask |
|---|---|
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