David's Blog

ILM has a unique interviewing process. I had a couple of phone interviews before they flew me to San Francisco for a 2 hour on-site interview.

I was told during my first phone interview that if I made it to an on-site interview, I was expected to make a 30 minute presentation about research I've done on my own.

An interview is stressful enough, but a *presentation* as well? I wasn't looking forward to that!

To pick a topic, I looked back at posting in my blog. I wanted to do something related to computer graphics and something that might be interesting to ILM.

I decided to go with Ambient Occlusion. Here is my blog post about it.

I was very nervous at first, but give ILM credit for making a very comfortable environment.

The presentation was in a conference room with a projector. I brought my laptop with my slides and hooked it up to their projector. About 9 ILM R&D engineers were on hand. We all sat around a table with me at the head with my laptop. I think sitting, as opposed to standing, made it feel more like a discussion instead of a presentation, which I appreciated. The engineers asked me questions about almost every slide. The questions were guinine and *not* designed to frustrate. They made it very easy.

Here are the slides I used for the presentation.

After the presentation, a few people left and a few people joined the conference room. We spent the next hour talking about my resume with time at the end for me to ask them questions.

I told the HR representative that I was initially concerned about their interview process, but now feel it is one of the best I have been through.

A day after I returned to Dallas, I had a final hour long technical phone interview about work I've done.

I was notified that ILM was interested an hour after this call.

Posted on January 25, 2007 9:16 AM | Permalink| Comments (2)