Earlier in August I received an email from an HR at Epic Systems. It is a electronic medical record company in Madison, Wisconsin. They don’t sponsor identity for international student. I had a phone interview followed by an online assessment later.
Some good things about the company are:
- Private company, not all decisions are money driven.
- Every 5 years in Epic gives you a 1 month sponsored trip to any country in the world. You can split the 1 month into two 2-weeks trip to two different countries. I am not sure the sponsorship is for individual only or also includes family members though.
- Maybe you can learn some information security stuff if you are in the right team because they do have security tools to guard medical information.
The phone interview was majorly about resume and behavior questions. The good thing was they actually assigned you a developer as interviewer. You don’t have to memorize exact start and end dates of your working experiences however you still want to be prepared because they ask questions in detail. There’s No technical question in phone interview. Some questions are like:
- What is your favorite language?
- Why you choose your major? Why you choose Epic?
- Tell me about yourself and the projects you’ve done.
- What are difficulties you encountered in doing <your project>?
- What improvement would you do to <your project> if you can do it again?
- Can you relocate to Madison?
- Do you have other plans besides applying for our position? like graduate school or other full time opportunities.
You are also asked to finish a Rembrandt Profile which contains more behavior questions. No technical question will be asked in this file. Then they send you a email with a link to schedule your online assessment. You have to finish the assessment within 5 days from the receipt of email. Everything is in Central Time so you’ll have to calculate the time correctly.
Online Assessment had 3 parts. The first part was a speed test which asked you to finish as many math questions as possible in a short time (10 mins). If you are fine with SAT/GRE you will be fine. The second part was 30 multiple choices, they gave you a description of a new language MIIS and asked basic questions about it. MIIS has its own definition for variable names, data types and expression evaluation rules. They asked questions like “Is this a valid expression?” or “What’s the value of this expression?”. The third part was 4 coding questions. All tasks except the speed test didn’t have a time limit.
Coding test was very serious, they had this third party integrity person monitoring you through camera & microphone the whole time. I bet this was the most unnecessarily serious technical interview I’ve ever met. Once this third party person came in, you cannot even switch tabs to google something because they would know and they didn’t allow you to do so. If your head tilted too much and was missing from the camera, they would interrupt you and told you to tilt back. The editor didn’t have a compiler so you had no idea if anything was working or not. You could choose from C to Ruby to finish coding questions. I am not sure whether pseudo code is allowed because I didn’t see an option for pseudo code. The third party person was apparently not a CS major and refused to answer any questions, for example, “What are alpha characters?” (I still do not know the answer so if anyone knows please tell me in comment). Coding questions include:
- Hour leg on a clock ticks every 12 minutes, minute leg ticks every minute. What is the less than 180 degree angle between hour and minute leg at <some specific time>?
- <I forget what this one was like>
- Print all character permutations for a string.
- Print all character permutations for a string. Upper level characters and hyphens should stay at the same location.
There would be an onsite followed by the online assessment however my journey probably ends here. If you do like the company and want to get in this article may help. Good Luck!
Si Qi Cao 