Hi everyone! My name is Andreea and I am from Moldova.

I'd like to share my story here as well! Hope that it will help someone along the way :D.

I started being interested in programming in high school as I took some courses outside of school. It was quite entertaining for me and I started going to a lot of hackathons and meeting people that actually work in the industry. This was very motivating for me to get going and to study CS at university.

I did apply to a university 1 year after this and actually, I applied to one university on the last day when the applications were open. It was quite lucky, to be honest, but I did get a scholarship with Stipendium Hungaricum in Budapest and Budapest Technical University.

University was quite hard. We met a lot of people that didn't finish courses in the first year in their 3rd year which was very scary. Initially, I came up with the idea in mind to start an internship straight away as I already knew how to code. Looking backwards I think I did overdo it, I was studying too hard and didn't actually need to dedicate that much time to just school. But I did make my best friends in uni and I am forever grateful for them <3.

In our student dorm, I did make acquaintance with Aliya who is another Outtalent graduate at the moment. Back then she already was such an inspiration for how to build a career. She is wonderful and I really needed a role model that was a woman in the field. All other friends in the industry that I knew were boys and I still was feeling quite insecure at times. Even though they were very inspiring to me as well. She was the most relatable person along the way.

I did use all of the summers in uni to do as many internships as I could. Moreover, because of the online education during covid, I could do internships even during the study period, which helped me a lot. Usually, I complete internships in Hungary at different corporations. It was nice but I knew that I definitely don't want to work there for long. So I did find this absolutely amazing internship that it's remote: MLH fellowship and I got to work with them with one start-up in the US and one Open Source project. MLH gave me the most confidence in me as an engineer. It was many causes why MLH had such a great impact on me. They are very open and focused on learning and in return, I did grow the most as an engineer. Their internships are also very well structured and they have a lot of absolutely amazing people in the community. It's very much similar to Outtalent by the vibe :D.

Outtalent:

I did apply to Outtalent even before the Wander program was created (January). I was rejected, but I had a call with Tilek and he said that graduate students are not his focus, but he inspired me to still study algorithms and apply to big tech myself. Of course, I didn't do it as much as I should've had. Right after this MLH started and I still didn't finish the Nokia internship I had a difficult semester at uni (don't do this). But it inspired me to dedicate the whole summer to studying algorithms and me and my friends got inspired by this. When I saw the wonder program I was absolutely thrilled. I did get Anna(Hramova she is also in the group) onboard so we both applied and got into the program at the same time.

I was very motivated to have all of the calls each week and see how everyone was doing and try to move even faster. There were lows and ups, the entire summer I thought that I don't progress much until Tilek made me advance to harder problems. Ana Ghidelli is such an inspiration. I spent with her most of my Friday nights preparing for the behavioural, which also in a way made me more confident for the algorithms part as well. I and Anna were constantly thinking what if we don't get ANY offers. I was always looking at solutions and was stuck, and sometimes I couldn't even remember how I solved previous problems. Some topics I couldn't understand even now(I am looking at you bit problems!)

The thing with the new grad programs is that you have a deadline, they open and you never know when they will close the position or if they will hire more new grads after this So I pushed Tilek and Ana to apply earlier. I woke up at 5 am and I and Tilek asked for the referrals for my #1 priority companies. I was totally unprepared though but didn't want to lose my chance. In 4 hours the recruiter from Google Zurich already contacted me. How I look at it now, it was destiny :D. But back then I was super tricked out, I pushed my technical screening for more than 1 month and then 1 more month right before the interview. During this time I was solving problems every day and having interviews with other companies. There are many stages, and some of them are easier than others, for example, the online assessment was easier and prepared me for the next stages. I got a Stripe offer and to be honest I didn't need many algorithms to pass this interview. It was so natural, just coding, writing clean code and explaining clearly what I think. I got also an Amazon offer at the same time, somehow the interviews also went pretty great, they love asking threes questions and trees are also my favourites.

After this, the interviews went much better cause I already had the offer of my dreams (Stripe) and I really liked the vibe of the company. I got the Booking offer very easy as well, the coding part was online and the questions were LeetCode easy while the onsite was completely behavioural (thanks Ana!!!). Next on my calendar was Facebook. Stripe gave me a very short time to accept the offer of 1,5 weeks. So I pushed Facebook with this. I think I got my technical screening the following week and the interview result was in 1 day. Then I had 1 week 2 technical interviews and 1 behavioural from Facebook and 1 technical screening from Google. Everything went great and I knew that the Facebook interview went great, so I didn't stress much over the Google interview. During that week though I had the worst flu in 2 years and once I couldn't even answer a follow-up cause I was coughing so much. But I made it!! In 2 days I had the Meta (Facebook)  offer. Google was the last battle, the onsite was 5 hours, for me then meant migrant 100% will happen( and it did). But it was a great experience. I liked all of my interviewers (except the one for behavioural, he was the worst ever). The problems were very clear about how they can be solved and it was a good vibe overall. So I packed all of my stuff and went for Christmas home with a light heart and knowing that the interviews went good, but I couldn't wait to know the result. Google is different because they have the Hiring Committee taking forever, then Team Matching. But it is worth the hustle. I got to have a call with 1 team from Google Calendar Web and I absolutely loved the product, the manager, and the office (Zurich). I got the offer approximately 1 month after the onsite I got the offer but I felt like here not everything is smooth. Tilek told me that new grads hardly get into Zurich without EU documents, of course, I thought that if Google accepted then they will open a visa. Well, I was wrong, for a visa I needed 3 years of full-time experience in the field AFTER University. This is a total bummer, however, I was in the process of getting EU citizenship anyway, I didn't have an update about this for 4 years, but I decided to research. Long story short I got the citizenship after multiple waiting stages and everything. I am still in the process of finishing some other paperwork but seems like I am going to Zurich this summer :D.