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Behavioral Interview

5 min read

An interview that provides you a list of behavioral questions and expects a response in STARR or ATOLA.

  • Tell us about a time you experienced conflict

Templates

Tell us a bit about yourself

Hi, my name is David.

  • I study computer science and statistics at the university of toronto.
  • I started my journey in robotics, developing low-level in C
  • I gradually moved into system administration as I found many of my responsibilities in my clubs lied in setting up infrastructure and services that we would use
  • In my senior year of highschool, i moved into cybersecurity through reverse engineering which I found really interesting
  • Currently we run a small security community that is involved in CTFs, conferences and developing security tooling and threat hunting

Describe a time when you had to step up and demonstrate leadership

  • Situtation: 1 year ago, a club for designing open source projects, grouped with some new programmers, i acted as a facilitator and leader
  • Task: We were to design a maintainable project in the realm of web scraping
  • Action: I setup requirements, constraints and expected technology, explained technical concepts and held development meetings to guide them
  • Response: As a group of 5, we pushed a working product within two months. We learned a lot, I learned a lot more about backend design, our group ended up building a few more things together

Give me a example of a time when you faced conflict with a cowoker

  • Situtation: I was in a team where I was the tech lead for a group of 5, and there was one person who would not work, and they would not attend meetings
  • Solution: I came from a place of understanding, I told them, they missed the past few meetings, is everything OK? And I gave them a brief summary of things we have done
  • Resolution: The team member did have some life issues, and they did end up rejoining us and making a great impact. They really appreciated my providing them support.

Time that I made a mistake

  • Situtation: In my senior year of highschool, I wanted to setup a workshop to teach people linux, and how to customize their machines
  • Problem: When I had tried to get people to connect, issues with the server was very slow, sometimes it would terminate connections, some people couldn’t connect
  • Lessons: I had ran tests on my home network, but not on the school network. I have to use sufficient tests next time I host something big, in the right environments!

Greatest Weakness

  • Im a very isolated person, I try to do a lot of work by myself, and I dont ask for help a lot of the time
  • People ask if I can do something, and I say yes, and then things get delayed
  • So, ive been working in a lot of team settings now, organizing club events, the first few events I did by myself, whats coming up now is that we are going to be teaching web exploitation, and I dont know a lot of that
  • So, ive been trusting and delegating tasks to people I know that I can trust to do this work

Greatest Weakness 2

  • Sometimes I have a hard time saying No to things, and this has caused me to take on more responsibility and burning out
  • Its important to understand your own boundaries and I have been actively working on this
  • Example is sector, during midterm season, I had to say no to going
  • I have been more cognisant of time, what I can do and cant do, and to be honest to myself and have realistic way of managing time

Reaching out to Non-Responsive

  • Situtation: We won a prize, but the organization responsible for reaching out, never responded
  • Solution: I tried different emails, I asked team members to message them aswell, I went to linkedin and reached out to an email listed there
  • It ended up working, and we got the prize money in the end

Time when you were under pressure, how did you deal with it

  • Situation: Midterm season, ended after competition, club responsibility
  • Solution: I created a priority list, I crossed removed routines that took excess time, crossed out things in my schedule, started waking up earlier to do more things. Worked to try to achieve as much as possible in each task. So this was skimming through the exam and making note sheets, creating basic outlines for deliverables, reading things in the bus, etc

Who are you

  • CS + Stats Major at UofT
  • Part of UofTCTF and CSEC where i teach people cybersecurity and systems programming
  • Ive been doing a lot of fullstack work recently, mostly with React,Go,AWS but I have been learning Springboot
  • I used to handle infrastructure and network automation, in my spare time I maintain a homelab where i setup FOSS

Project you’ve worked on

  • Functional Programming language (First class functions, Higher order functions, multiple return)
  • Developed in C++, emits LLVM
  • I have parsing complete and partial codegen for basic arithmetic
  • Im very glad to have started this, Its changed the way at how I look at things
    • Im more curious about other languages (Lua Registry)
    • Its helped in reverse engineering software
    • Just made me a better programmer

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