7 Bonus: Interview Preparation
7.1 Introduction
This bonus chapter is intended to help you prepare for interviews in case you are job searching or you want to advance your career. Over the course of my career I was privileged to be given several chances to interview, and therefore, I will share many of the questions that I was asked and the best way to respond to each of them.
7.2 Interview Questions and suggested responses
I will divide the questions into basic and advanced. Basic questions are common questions that you will be asked when interviewing for junior roles like clinical programmer I or II, while the advanced section will cover questions that you will encounter while interviewing for more senior roles like clinical programmer III, Senior or Principal Programmer.
7.2.1 Basics
Q: Which SDTM domains have you worked on?
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Q: Give classifications of the SDTM data sets
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Q: Explain the concept of baseline flag
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Q: Explain any three ways of creating macro variables in SAS
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Q: What are the key variables in SE domain?
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7.2.2 Advanced
Q: Distinguish between EX and EC and give the order in which they are created.
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Q: What is the use of an id statement in proc report?
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Q: Explain DTYPE variable as used in ADAM datasets.
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Q: Give classification of ADAM datasets with examples.
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Q: What is treatment emergent adverse event? Show how to derive it programmatically
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Q: Which efficacy datasets have you worked on, and what were the key efficacy parameters that you derived
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Q: Which kind of graphs have you worked on?
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7.2.3 Statistics based Questions
Q: Explain the concept of confidence intervals
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Q: Give examples of classification algorithms you have worked on?
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Q: Distinguish between supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms and give examples.
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Q: Give an example of any statistical models that you have worked on and any challenges you faced.
7.2.4 R based Questions
Q: Which packages/libraries have you worked with before?
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Q: How do you ensure reproducibility in R? Which libraries can be used to ensure reproducibility in R?
Q: Do you have experience with version control tools? Name the ones you have used
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Q: How do you format numbers in R eg format 2 to display as 2.0
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Q: Any experience with Rshiny? Explain the concept of reactivity as relates to shiny apps
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