Lab 21 · Mock Interview Practice Lab

🎯 Objective

Practise the performance side of hiring: explaining your own work clearly, thinking aloud, and staying honest under pressure.

🧩 Skills You Will Practice

• Project storytelling (2-minute summaries)
• Technical fundamentals revision
• Handling unknown questions
• Asking smart questions

🧰 What You Need

• A partner (friend or classmate) OR a phone recorder for solo mode
• Your resume printed or on screen
• The Interview Preparation lesson question areas for your track

📋 Step-by-Step Tasks

1. Brief your partner with the structure: 10 minutes project questions, 10 minutes fundamentals from your track, 5 minutes your questions to them. Record the whole session on a phone.
2. Project round: your partner picks any project on your resume and asks What does it do, Why this design, Hardest bug and fix, What would you improve. Answer in 2 minutes each, out loud, without opening the code.
3. Fundamentals round: 6 questions from your track (for web: page-load flow, DOM, Git; for security: phishing, 2FA, when testing is legal; for AI/CS: how models train, binary, OS jobs). Think aloud — reasoning is scored, not just answers.
4. Weakness round: answer one question you genuinely do not know using the honest format: what you do know, your reasoning, and the boundary of your knowledge. Never invent a confident fake answer.
5. Your questions round: ask 3 smart questions about the role, team and first three months, as if it were real. Note which answers a real candidate would actually need.
6. Listen to the recording once with a notebook: mark every filler-heavy, vague or bluffing moment. Choose your 2 weakest answers and rewrite them, then re-record only those two.
7. File the score sheet: project round /10, fundamentals /10, honesty and clarity /10, and the date of your next mock. Monthly repetition is the system.

✅ Expected Result / Deliverable

A recorded mock interview, a scored rubric out of 30, rewritten versions of your 2 weakest answers, and a scheduled next mock — calm, practised and provable.

⚠️ Common Mistakes

• Memorising script answers word-for-word (collapses at the first follow-up)
• Bluffing an unknown answer
• Never recording, so the same weaknesses repeat forever