Uber Career Prep Fellows

Nov 7th, 2022
career internship application interview-prep
13 min read

Table of Contents

This past year, I participated in the Uber Career Prep Fellowship, a seven-month program with five virtual workshops ranging in content from technical interview prep to learning about different careers in computing. In addition, the program has mock interviews and homework assignments to help expand your technical knowledge. I was also paired 1x1 with an Uber Engineer who guided me throughout the program. You’ll also have ample opportunities to meet with members of Uber’s employee resource groups, who will also be a considerable part of your Success in this one-of-a-kind experience!

All Uber Career Prep Fellows were allowed to interview for a paid summer 2023 internship position, assuming they met all program requirements.

Disclaimer

I’m not an Uber Recruiter, and I can’t get you hired or selected for the program. None of this advice is official (unless otherwise stated). These are reflections based on the personal experience of past participants and me.

Ideal Candidates

CS/Computing adjacent students who have at least two interning summers left before they graduate. (for this year’s program, you are graduating in 2025 or 2026)

Comments on Diversity

Another fellow, Elias, mentioned that he was “the only Mexican in the 2022 cohort, with only 2 Latins total” (see his full article here).

Uber has two-pronged goals for this program: (1) Increase access to quality CS education and (2) Increase diversity in the recruiting pipeline. These goals are a little conflicting since recruiting priorities are to get the brightest minds from the top schools. Reaching genuinely marginalized people means reaching out to non-target schools and folks in schools outside the US. The people who would benefit the most from the program are not overcommitted top students at Stanford, UIUC, Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Duke, Princeton, and Columbia, but folks in community college or no-name universities outside the US who are still very smart but don’t get opportunities.

Application

Interview Process/Timeline

Here is my timeline with the program:

Application Window: sometime Dec - Jan 16

Invite to interview: Feb 1

Preliminary Interview: Feb 15

Accepted to UCP! Feb 23

Workshops

I’m including a brief overview of each workshop and my notes. Hopefully, you can get a vague idea of what happened and my takeaways. There were also some role-playing and interactive sessions, but it’s harder to take notes on those, so they are mostly not included.

  1. Workshop 1: March 3-4, 2022
    Main Sessions: Engineering in School vs. Industry, Inclusive Design, Interview Best Practices/Technical Role-play (+breakout sessions)
    DAY 1
    • How to prepare for school
    • do lots of projects/courses/internships
    • develop writing skills/communications
    • build your peer network, solicit mentors
    • practice negotiation skills
    • How to select the first job
    • Find supportive teammates/manager
    • Align your career goal with your manager’s goal
    • Three dimensions of new grad role: company, manager/team, scope/role/impact
    • can use a weighted matrix to help decide between offers
    • Learn best practices on the job (system design, code documentation)
    • Deliver the right thing at the right time for the right customer
    • What to do in an FT job
    • Manage yourself
    • Develop for the long term (readable, well-documented)
    • How to do that
    • Solicit feedback from mentors/peers
    • Learn best practices (be proactive)
    • Quantify your impact
    • make demos/presentations and teach
    • present your work based on what your audience thinks is valuable
    • How to SHIP!
    • collect project reqs
    • Do BG research
    • cover all the edge cases
    • document findings and proposed solutions
    • take into account future system load increase, scale
    • ask for feedback
    • test our code!
    • launch your thing, continuously monitor for breaking changes

DAY 2

DAY 2

DAY 2

Homeworks

I cannot share the homework or the questions, but please make sure you can implement the following in your language of choice and use them to solve LC problems.

  1. Arrays, Strings, Linked Lists, Stacks & Queues, and Recursion
  2. Graphs and Trees
  3. Sorting and Searching
  4. Recursion and Dynamic Programming

Mentorship

I got paired with a mentor at Uber, and we mostly spent sessions talking about homework assignments and mock interview feedback. He also connected me to a PM who works in accessibility since that’s something I am interested in.

Conversion Interview

Two 1 hr interviews:

My first interview was on July 25, and my second was on July 27. From what I heard, some fellows didn’t get second rounds. The decisions were sent to us around August 18.

Offers and Compensation

I’m including this for transparency.

Compensation

The original offer deadline they gave me was 9/2.

Other Details I moved my internship to Winter 2023 (Jan-May) in SF. I was supposed to intern on the Eats team, but I was placed on the Membership team when I joined.