First- and second-year internships, co-op and placement-year interviews, intern coding rounds and earning a return offer.
5 questions in Early Careers, Internships & Graduate Hiring.
A co-op interview or placement year interview hires someone to join a real team for anywhere from four months to a year or more, so it probes whether you can become productive in an unfamiliar codebase, stay engaged across the whole term and work inside a team, not only whether you can learn quickly over a summer.
A first- or second-year internship interview expects core data structures from your first courses, arrays, strings, hash maps and simple loops, used correctly and explained aloud. Beyond that it scores how you reason, how you take a hint and how quickly you learn, not prior jobs or advanced algorithms.
Pick one coursework project, say plainly that it was an assignment and what the brief fixed, then spend the answer on the decisions you made inside that brief, the problem that cost you the most time and what you would change. Owned decisions and honest scope matter more than how impressive the project sounds.
Coding without a compiler means doing the computer's checking yourself. Write two or three test cases before the code, keep functions small with clear names, then trace one test by hand line by line, aloud. The trace finds the bugs a run would have found, and it shows the interviewer how you verify.
A return offer mostly rests on what your manager and mentor can write about you: a project finished to an agreed scope, evidence you acted on feedback, and work they saw progress. Ask for explicit feedback at the midpoint, cut scope to finish, and write the work up. Headcount you cannot control also matters.