Welcome again to the course. In this video, what I'm going to do is go over the goals that we have for the course. So let me just start off with a story about one of my previous students. A couple years back, one of my top students, a really talented student, got an interview at a company which seemed like a perfect fit. And the student went off for the interview. I thought he'd be highly successful, he came back and when I debriefed with him, I found out it hadn't gone well at all. He was surprised by the format. He didn't realize who he would be interviewing with. And then when he started telling me some of the questions that he was asked, I recognize him in this really common interview questions but he'd never heard them before. And only through a discussion with him, I realized he hadn't really participated in the prep that a lot of our students do to prepare for interviews. So it wasn't that he wasn't good at computer science. It wasn't that he wasn't a good software engineer. It was just that he hadn't been prepared properly. And our students here use USD spend a lot of time, in general, getting prepared for their interviews. And part of our goals for this course is bringing that experience, that preparation that our students do, to you. So, how this usually works, is we have a whole bunch of our students, every year, apply for internships and apply for jobs. And what they do is they get a whole bunch of experience back. So they go off to these companies, they interview there. So they gain a whole bunch of interview experience. And they also get jobs at these companies, and they learn what the skills are at the job that really matter. And then when they come back from those interviews and they come back from the job, what do they do? They talk, they talk a lot. And what are they going to talk about? They're going to talk about all that they've learned in the interviews, and what they've learned on the job. So some of the things that they're likely to discuss. Well, they're going to talk a lot about the interview format. They're going to talk about what kind of questions they've heard. They're going to debrief those questions in actually quite detail. Like, what would be the optional solution? What's a decent solution? Can we code this up? They're also going to talk about where they struggled in interview and what kind of tips they found to help be successful. When they come back from their work experience they're going to do similar things. They're going to talk about what life is like at that company. What's the philosophy? What is life just generally like there? And they're also going to talk about the skills that matter there. And sometimes the skills that matter in the workplace don't match exactly with what they've taught in the academic setting. So it's an opportunity to prepare for the some of the skills that are more common in industry right now. They'll also talk about where they struggled in the job. And again they'll give some tips about how they succeeded on their internship. Now these kind of discussions actually form in groups. For the interviews, they actually form interview study groups, as a result. And they get together and they practice and they prepare and they do that essentially all year in prep for their interview season. And for the people who have been working in industry, they actually formed alumni groups. And we have our alumni come back fairly often to UCSD and talk about what life is like in various companies and give hints about how to succeed in the interview. And again, it's these groups that we're essentially going to try to give you the feel of. And try to give you the same experience that our students have, again, through this MOOC. In this course, we're going to be focusing on two, what I'm going to call, critical pairings. The first of these pairings is recognizing that success on the job and success in interviews requires both technical, or sometimes called hard skills, as well as soft skills. Now the technical skills, you're probably pretty comfortable with. These are the things like knowing what a linked list is. The soft skills are your communications skills, and your ability to work with other people, and your ability to persevere through hardship. These are the two skills that are both essential, again, in the interview and in the job. That pairing, that one I just said, is actually the second piece here. The skills that are required for a good interview, happened to match quite well with the skills that are required on the job. So let me talk a little bit more about these pairings. So everyone has a large component of soft skills, as well as technical skills. And if you think about it, essentially the bar to succeed in an interview or on the job, requires some combination of both. Now, there are a lots of different ways to essentially reach this bar of success in your career, and let me just walk through a couple. So, you could imagine some people are really well balanced. They've got pretty strong technical skills and pretty strong soft skills, and that achieves the bar for success. But you also find people who are really strong technically and just a little bit weaker on the soft skills. That can also reach that bar of success. And lastly, you'll find people who are exceptional in soft skills and then just a little bit weaker in technical skills. And again, they also meet this bar. I have plenty of friends who have successful careers who match one of these molds. The bottom line though, is that both are important, and this course is going to help you address both. I'm going to talk more about soft skills in our next video. I'm going to talk a little bit about this pairing of interview and career success. So what are the skills that's required for you in the interview? And what are the skills that are required for you on the job? So think about what's required in an interview. You're going to have to introduce yourself to new people. You're going to have to explain your work projects. You're going to have to write code. You're going to have to solve new problems. And if you think about what's required for you on the job, you know these things basically match one to one, right? You're constantly still going to be introducing yourself to new people, people outside your team, people outside your company. You're still going to have to explain the value of your work to other people. And of course you're still going to be writing code and you're going to be solving your problems. Interviews are very well designed to test the skills that you actually need to succeed on the job. So the skills we're providing you in this course actually match well to both. So let's talk a little bit more about what's going to happen in this course. So by the end of this course, you should be able to evaluate a successful job skill on both on technical and soft-skill merit. In terms of that, you're going to be able to introduce yourself, which we're going to work on this week. You can go to, write code, which we're going to work on in week two. You're going to be able to describe prior projects, or describe your work, and we're going to focus on that in week three. You're going to be able to solve new problems, and we're focusing on that in week four. Also, you're going to be able to describe best-practices, tips, and common pitfalls for successful interviews. This week, we're going to be focusing on understanding what's involved in the interview process. So by the end of this week you should be able to describe the format of the interview and who are the people involved. As part of that, we're going to help you prepare for getting an interview, as well as look at some, say, resume best practices. We're also going to talk about the role of the technical phone screen, as well as the in-person visit, and what to expect in each. We'll also give you some tips and some hints about how to prepare for interviews in general. And we're going to end with some practice of introducing yourself to others, like you'll do in the interview. So what we'll do next is spend a little more time defining soft skills, and I'll see you in that next video.
