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Sample Interview Questions

Over the years we have interviewed many people for our student jobs. We view our jobs as a mix of providing an excellent opportunity to train University of Oregon students in the practical areas of customer interaction, support, communication both verbal and written, and to provide the type of "real world" computer knowledge that many employers request.

With this in mind, however, we must still provide a high level of support to the UO campus community. Thus, we cannot hire people with minimal knowledge of MacOS or Windows or fundamental network concepts.

To give you an idea of the level of knowledge we are looking for here are some sample interview questions that we have asked, or will ask for both our Microcomputer Services Consultant or Departmental Apprentice positions. If you can't answer all these questions don't worry, but if you understand the answers, and are interested in learning more, then we would love to see your application when jobs become available.

Question

A customer brings in a laptop and says it's been running very slowly lately. What would you check and/or what questions would you ask?

• Ask if they've been getting pop-up windows
• Check to see how much RAM it has
• Ask when the problem began
• Run anti-spyware and anti-virus checks
• (and more)

Question

What is DNS? What does it stand for and why do we care that it exists?

Answer

A DNS or Domain Name Server is what allows us to type in names instead of IP addresses to get to Web servers, use Telnet, FTP, etc. For instance, when you type "ssh shell.uoregon.edu" your machine queries the UO DNS server at 128.223.142.32 and asks for the IP address of shell.uoregon.edu. It then uses this IP address to connect to the machine.

Question

Someone on campus calls and says they have a new laptop and want to get wireless working. They've just pulled it out of the box. What might they need to set to make this work?

Answer

By default the computer should pick up the university's wireless network, uowireless, automatically. If not:

• Check to make sure the wireless card is turned on.
• Disable and re-enable the wireless card.

Question

A user wants to get a file to someone else. How many different ways might they do this, and mention any issues you might run into with each?

Answer

There are quite a few possibilites here. Let's list them and give a quick mention of possible issues.

• Attach the file to an email message. Often the easiest answer, but the receiver might not know how to deal with an attached file. You need to verify they have the correct application on their machine to open the attached file. You need to verify they use an email program that can deal with an attached file. If the file is large (10+MB) an attachment will often be rejected by the receiving system. Note that attached files are often larger than the original when sent due to the methods of encoding the file.
• Place the file somewhere the user can connect to download it. This is usually quite tricky as it involves FTP, FTP servers, explaining how to use FTP, etc. Also, you do not want a user giving out their username and password so that someone can get to their account to get a file. This is a very bad idea, and against University policy.
• Place the file on a Website and allow the receiver to download it via a Web browser. Not a bad idea as long as the file does not need to be secure. If it does need to be secure then you may need to deal with methods for password protecting the file.
• If text will work, use this and send it in the body of an email message.
• Fax the printed document if appropriate, and/or send the file via mail on a disk!

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