Interview Preparation

What is your greatest weakness?

General Tips

• Turn a negative into a positive
• Be honest
• Don’t go overboard
• Keep it positive

😇Perfectionism

• I have a very strong attention to detail. Sometimes, this can turn into a tendency to perfectionism. In the past, I found this leading me to triple-check every item on a spreadsheet, closely proofread emails to ensure I’d communicated what I was trying to get across in a clear, concise way, or fiddle with the layout of a presentation to ensure that it was perfect. I’ve since learned to successfully budget my time and gauge which tasks require and actually benefit from this level of precision.
• I used to like to work on one project to its completion before starting on another, but I’ve learned to work on many projects at the same time, and I think doing so allows me to be more creative and effective in each one.

😫Last-minute

• I used to wait until the last minute to set appointments for the coming week, but I realized that scheduling in advance makes much more sense. I’m now much more proactive about scheduling meetings, and this allows me to plan and segment out my work for the week without having to guess at when I’ll need to leave time for meetings.

🤠What do you wish to accomplish here

• I’ll reach out to all the colleagues in my department and intersecting departments to learn as much as possible about the roles that everyone plays within the operation. I will devour all the information you’ve provided on policies and procedures, and during the evening, I’ll continue reading everything I can find about the company and industry to get an accurate fix on the state of the firm within the marketplace. Our professional association offers some online tutorials as well, so I will work on those during my off hours.
• Over the course of the first week, I will compile a list of questions that can’t be answered through printed resources or conversations with colleagues…and address them with my supervisor when we meet.
• I am a list person, so I like to write down objectives for learning to stay on track. For example, you mentioned how important the online purchasing system is to this job, so I would include the goal of mastering that system during the first two weeks at the top of my list.

Q: How many tennis balls can fit a room✅

Pro Tip It is the approach that matters in such type of a problem as the interviewer is interested to know your problem solving ability and how you structure your thoughts and synthesise numbers to get an approx. answer.

Step 1: Clarify the Question

ambiguities / clarification / vague / unstated components

//Are we looking at a commercial airplane or a military airplane?

• Bedroom Type Are we asking a particular bedroom or a typical one
  • like of average size / layout / furnitures distribution
• Furnitures Are we allowed to remove all the furnitures and left with an empty room? If not, could we place tennis balls in the hollow areas, like in cabinets, chests and drawers?
• //Random or Maximum？

Step 2: Catalog and Model the Room

• Take the measurement of furnitures
  • closet, cabinet, desks, bed(king size/ queen size), TV, coffee table, dresser, couch, night-table
  • (IKEA: Go to the website to check the specifications)
• The Most Direct Approximation Count the empty volume of the room, divided by the volume of a tennis ball (a ball of diameter 5cm)
• Improvement: (balls are not liquid): Take the circumscribed cube as the volume / or take the circumscribed cylinder as the volume
  • Model the empty volume of the room as a series of cuboids, and calculate each seperately.
  • More improvements: the ball-to-cube approximation: [Lateral View] a third ball / wasted volumes: not enough height to contain one ball
  • Computer simulation
  • real-world simulation