Common Internship Interview Questions

Worried that your internship recruiter will grill you with difficult questions that you might not know how to answer? We have you covered.

Quite often, an internship interview is one of the first formal interviews a student or graduate will go through as they start building the foundations of their career journey. Needless to say, it can feel quite daunting at the beginning.

Doing the proper prep work won’t only help you get over those nerves, it’ll also help you better express yourself during the session. One good way to start your preparation is to list down common questions recruiters ask their candidates, and figure out well how best to respond to each of them while naturally highlighting your strengths.

To help you, we’ve prepared a list of common interview questions and how you can answer them to impress your recruiters in the process!

1.

Tell me about yourself Why did you apply for an internship with this company?

Similar questions: “Why do you want to work here?” and “Why should we hire you?” Interviews typically start with this question to get you warmed up. But avoid getting too relaxed and giving basic information your interviewers already know, such as your name and age.

Your answer should sell your strengths and show your personality in relation to the internship role on offer. To kick things off, you can form a response with these four points: • Your year and course of study • Your career aim or the career path you are interested in • Your interests or hobbies, if they’re relevant to the job scope • Your reason for applying to the internship

Aside from the first point, your answer should emphasise your strengths in relation to the role on offer. For instance, if you’re a business student interested in the programmer intern position, you can talk about how you intend to pursue a career in the same line of work in the future, and how this position will help give you the relevant work experience.

You could also talk about the activities you spend your spare time on, such as hackathons and app development courses online, where you’ve honed and developed technical skills that’ll be essential for the internship.

You can even go the extra mile by talking about how your business degree has made you more commercially aware of the industry, and how you can contribute business strategies and ideas to the IT company you’re applying to.

2.

Similar questions: “What do you know about our company?” and “How do you relate to our company values?” This question is usually asked to test your knowledge about the employer. Your response should demonstrate that you’ve done sufficient research about the company beyond a quick skim over the “About Us” section on the employer’s website.

Read up on the company’s history, values and press releases to get an in-depth understanding. If the employer maintains a presence on social media, follow their accounts to get the latest news. With enough research under your belt, you should be able to connect the dots by aligning your work goals, style and personality to what the company stands for, or how you can relate to its business.

Think about the company’s areas of specialisation and how they relate to your career aims and interests. What’s their vision and mission, and how do they relate to your own values? For example, if the company you’re applying to has a strong corporate social responsibility branding and is a strong advocate for animal rights, you can win your interviewers over by giving an example of how you’ve also participated in relevant activities, such as volunteering at an animal shelter.

Your research will show your enthusiasm and reassure your interviewers that you’re truly interested in the company, and will also win you generous brownie points.

3.

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

Similar question: “Give me two positive and negative adjectives that you would use to describe yourself.” This question is a tricky one. You have a chance to sell yourself, but also risk revealing traits that may jeopardise your chances of getting the internship. However, the purpose of this question is for your interviewers to learn more about your abilities and your motivation to improve on your weaker qualities rather than judging your weaknesses.

Talking about your strengths is fairly straightforward – think about the skills and traits you possess that are relevant to the company and role. Self-motivation is usually a good selling point to highlight as employers generally like candidates who are proactive and keen to learn. Use examples from school projects, activities or student clubs to back up your strengths as well.

But when it comes to talking about weaknesses, students and graduates alike tend to make the mistake of nervously stating a negative trait about themselves and leaving it at that. Worse, the blunder of using a weakness that would directly impact your work performance in the job role.

First of all, you need to remain composed and confident. Stating your weakness is a bad thing only if you’re doing nothing about it.

Secondly, there’s a strategy to answering this question – talk about your weaknesses and then follow your statements by describing what you are doing to improve yourself. For example, you can talk about how you don’t have the best memory and tend to forget things when there’s an information overload. Follow up by talking about the steps you’ve taken to overcome this, such as always jotting down the tasks you’re assigned to do so that you won’t forget them.

4.

Tell us about a time when you had to deal with a difficult situation

Similar question: “Give me an example or a situation where you encountered a challenge.” This is a competency question to evaluate your behaviour and strengths, and is also meant to understand how you would respond to difficult situations. By asking such questions, your interviewers can predict how you would handle a workplace conflict or issue, from managing deadlines to interacting with difficult clients or co-workers.

When it comes to competency interview questions, you can always use the STAR approach to structure your response: • Situation: Provide the context by describing the situation to your interviewers. • Task: What were your goals? • Action: Explain what your specific actions were. • Result: Describe the end result – even if the overall project didn’t end on a good note, make sure that it reflects you in a good light.

Here’s an example of how you can come up with an answer using this approach:

• Situation

I was President of the Music Society on campus, and was in charge of the Battle of the Bands event in January this year. We experienced a major hiccup on the day of the event when one of the judges who was supposed to be on the judging panel informed us that he couldn’t make it at the last minute.

• Task

We had only two hours to inform the contestants of the change, update the emcee’s script for the event and edit the PowerPoint slides that were supposed to show pictures of the judges against the backdrop of the stage.

• Action

I delegated the last-minute tasks according to my team members’ roles. Within the first hour, I told the emcee liaison to make sure that the emcee was informed of the change. I assigned the PA system team to ensure that the picture of the absent judge was removed from the slideshow.

Since we were a lean team, I personally took on the task to gather all the performers on stage to inform them of the lastminute change. An hour before the show, I did a final check on the PowerPoint slides and emcee script to make sure they were all updated.

• Results

The team was nervous about the unexpected problem at first, but because the last-minute tasks were delegated well and everyone did their part, the event went smoothly. Our audience was very happy with the event, and the contestants were excited to participate again the year after.

Tip

Avoid “blaming” someone else for a problem or challenge you face. The focus of your answer should be on your actions and results.