Insight Data Science Data Scientist Interview Questions
& Process

I applied for the Fall session in early June and heard back about an interview with the program director about a week after the deadline. The Zoom interview felt pretty casual. First, the interviewer introduced herself, and then I did the same. The goal was to keep it conversational, focusing on why I worked on my PhD project and then going into some detail. Next, I presented a project I'd been working on for about a month, which involved writing my own scraper, classes, functions, and a logistic regression model. I made sure to give a quick overview, explaining what each part of the code did without getting into line-by-line specifics. The interviewer asked about other potential features to boost the prediction score and even offered some good suggestions, making for a really engaging discussion about my project. I think they wanted to see how I'd react to constructive feedback rather than criticize my work. Lastly, we discussed the statistical models and programming languages I've used. The last few minutes were for my questions, and she kindly took a little extra time to answer them since she was free afterward. She mentioned I'd hear back in a couple of weeks, but I was surprised to get an acceptance email the same afternoon.

I applied the same day I learned about this program, since the description of this program is exactly what I need (I am post doc with huge desire to explore data science in industry ). I did not hear from them for more than 2 months and right before Thanksgiving I got less than 24 hours notice that Insight would like to have an interview. MY guess I was on some kind of waiting list. Since I had less than 24 hours, I decided to show one of my project without any specific preparation (matlab codes and figures). The interview was very relaxed and friendly. The interviewer talked about herself first and it helped to calmed down nerves. I was asked about my project, some ideas on what project or data I would like to work as a data scientist and etc.

I had 2 interviews. The first was about 1 month after applying and was 15 minutes long. They asked me to introduce myself and my research, and why I wanted to be a data scientist. The second interview was 3 weeks later and was 30 minutes. It started with introductions, then we went into more detail about my research, like how I applied specific algorithms and why I chose them. Then I showed my project slides, and we focused on the results and analysis for about 5 minutes. The last 7 minutes were for my questions.