Hi,

I've got an assessment centre coming up for getting an engineering internship at a Game Development Studio, and I'm trying to prepare myself for it as much as possible. I'm working through some additional theory, but obviously that's not the only thing I'm going to be asked to do there.

I was hoping someone who went through these things before could tell me what I should expect off these things in general. It's my first assessment centre, so I'm kind of in the dark about it.

Thanks in advance.

Ps. Don't know if it's relevant or not, but it's for an Internship

What the heck is an "assessment centre" if it isn't a place?

http://www.wikijob.co.uk/wiki/assessment-centre

""Assessment centres", also known as "assessment centers" (American spelling) or "assessment days", are an extended period of interviews, assessed tasks and assessment exercises, organised and held by recruiters for small groups of graduate level candidates (usually between six and 20 people)."

It seems a lot of people don't know about them, is it only recently that they started doing them?

I had to do something like that. It was for a permanent position rather than an internship, but I imagine they'd be similar. It involved:

• A written programming exercise - nothing super-difficult, mostly basic algorithmic stuff like reversing a string/linked list or recursively searching a tree
• A written "logic test", more abstract and not specific to any particular programming language
• An interview with a recruiter/HR person - questions about yourself and your aspirations, what you think about the company etc.
• Lunch
• The guided tour
• A technical interview with a couple of tech team leads - questions about development/programming and computer/internet architecture , "how would you solve this hypothetical problem?" exercises on a white-board, asked about the last technical article I read etc.
• An interview with someone in management - similar to the HR interview, but they were pretty clued in to how all the technical stuff fits together and so we could talk about technical areas I had an interest in
• Brief chat with the team leader for the area that the previous interview suggested I might fit best in
• Even more briefly meeting a couple of the executives/board - by this point I'd been there a few hours and so answering some questions I'd mostly already heard that day was no biggie
  One thing missing that friends of mine have mentioned is group exercises - I guess these are generally less technical, but you have to make an effort to be contributing in a visible way.
  
  So long as you know your technical stuff you should be just fine. Read up on the company (see if they've published any white-papers or articles, search news sites, read their blog etc.). Think about what challenges they might be dealing with in their day-to-day based on what projects they've got on the go, how they fit in the marketplace etc. Enthusiasm is also important, but don't hesitate to ask someone to clarify their question. One thing I've noticed some interviewers do is ask three or four questions in one go to see how you think and communicate on the spot (like "what happened? what did you do? how did you feel about the outcome?") - I'd recommend breaking it down and answering each question pretty explicitly, as it can be difficult to give a satisfactory answer to each one if you're jumping around and describing the situation in a more conversational/anecdotal way.

Thanks WavyVirus, I'll have a look at the stuff you mentioned, it seems quite useful. Whilst this assessment centre & Interview are quite nerve-wrecking, it's also exciting at the same time!