Evan got an offer as a Technical program manager at Meta

I'm excited about learning how to lead teams and projects at a fast paced company.

I was a student at Rutgers Business School.

I spent 2-3 hours a day preparing, over the course of 2 weeks. First, I watched videos and read articles online about system design. Then I did practice questions (ie "design YouTube" etc) and watched sample answers online. After doing 1-2 of these each day, I set up 3 tutor sessions to make sure my answers made sense for the interview. After they confirmed I was giving good answers, I did some more studying right before the interview.

The hardest part was studying for the system design interview, since I did not learn most of the concepts before. Since there are many topics, it helped to study a broad number of them.

Although I was interviewing for an Infra TPM position, the interviewer asked how I might launch a product from a marketing perspective. Although I did not expect this, I was able to give a good answer based on what I had previously shown to him during the interview.

Communication is a key part of the interview. Make sure you can clearly tell them what is going on in your mind. I suggest enumerating responses. Another good way to structure a response is by grouping: first talk about all the APIs, then all the databases, etc. Additionally, for university grad roles, it helped to be able to talk about a broad number of topics without studying too deeply. The interviewer seemed to appreciate that I knew different solutions, but never asked me incredibly technical questions. That being said, you should have a good understanding of some core principles.