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13 tough interview questions you may have to answer if you want to intern at SpaceX this summer
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Elon Musk, the CEO and CTO of SpaceX.
Forget about fetching coffee — as an intern at SpaceX, you’ll help design, build, and launch rockets that could potentially take humans to Mars.
So it follows that you’re going to have to answer some tough interview questions to get the gig.
Each year, more than 700 interns join SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, for 80-hour workweeks at about $22 an hour in departments like avionics, dynamics, launch operations, manufacturing, and enterprise information systems.
The hiring process typically consists of two in-depth phone interviews, during which intern candidates have to answer questions like the following, which we found on Glassdoor:
‘What are composites?’
‘What is the size of an integer on a 32-bit system?’
‘Let’s say you have a variable ‘var’ assigned to be ’2′. What will display if you print ‘var++’? If you print ‘++var’ on the next line, what will be displayed? What is the final value of ‘var’?’
‘What is a null pointer?’
‘If you have a large, heavy object moving very, very fast, how do you safely slow it down?’
‘How would you go about a design for an electrical harness to protect it from a sharp object falling from above?’
‘Imagine a cantilever beam fixed at one end with a mass = m and a length = L. If this beam is subject to an inertial force and a uniformly distributed load = w, what is the moment present at a length of L/4?’
‘How would you find a cycle in a singly-linked list?’
‘There are all kinds of data structures out there, like arrays and heaps. Why can’t there just be one that does it all?’
‘One side of a beam is attached to a wall and the other is free. If a force is applied, where would it break, and what would you need to know to determine the force that would break the beam?’
‘What happens when you run a high current (spot welding) through a nickel piece touching a copper piece?’
‘How do you reverse a stack, using only the pop and push methods?’
‘Describe the design process of a series of pipes to be used in a rapid fueling system for a liquid propellant rocket engine. Be sure to include which equations would be best for the case at hand for fluid pressure calculations and structural considerations.’
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