BAE Systems Electronics & Integrated Solutions Systems Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Nov 2008 in Nashua, NH (took a day)

I first spoke with a BAE representative at a Umass Amherst career fair. I told him that I was a Mechanical Engineer student, but had done a Summer internship doing some technical writing (Summer '08 internship with Westinghouse Nuclear). There are very few students who show an interest in both engineering and writing and I think this helped me to stand out. He was a Functional manager with BAE and said he knew of another manager who was looking for someone within this area of interest. Shortly after the career fair I got an email back inviting me to their facility for an interview. The interview was at 7am on a weekday, and it's important to note that BAE will pay for any travel expenses to get to the interview. I expected to be the only student going there with just one 1-on-1 interview for the day. However, there were a few other students that showed up as well, and we all went to a nice meeting room and got an informative general overview presentation from the same guy who I had spoke with at the fair. After the presenation we went to a waiting room and had a schedule of interviews so that the 4 or 5 of us students would rotate interviewing with the same 5 different BAE managers.

The interview themselves weren't too bad all in all. My first interview however was pretty brutal in that I ended up getting a lot of technical and conceptual questions that caught me off guard. Some examples include: "why does a curveball pitch in baseball curve?" and "what properties are important when you cook a turkey?" and "how would you figure out how many golf balls (or ping pong balls) could fit inside an airplane?". Although the questions were tough and I didn't really tackle any of them all that well, the guy was pretty nice and obviously just trying to determine our thought processing/problem solving abilities. My thoughts in retrospect and advice would be to say straight-up that- 'although I've learned a lot of this in school I'm not really good with on the spot technical questions, and I do much better when I have material and resources at my dispense'. I think this approach would have been better than trying to finagle my way around the questions or guessing at them, which never really works out well. After this first rough interview the rest were all pretty easy going and go the best if you can extend the initial friendly banter when you're getting to the the manager. That's your chance to show your people skills, and at the same time it can help make the interviewer (manager) feel more comfortable in there with you, which is a big positive. It's not always just us students being interviewed who feel uncomfortable and I always tried to use that to my advantage. So basically come out of your shell if you have one, ask them as many questions as you can such as how long have you worked for the company and how have you enjoyed working for BAE (or whoever). And be straight-forward with them and don't try to traverse any tough or strange questions.

They closed out our day of interviewing by having some current younger employees take all us students out to a nice lunch. This is another opportunity to show off some of your people/social skills and get to know more about BAE by talking to the guys and/or girls who take you out to lunch. After lunch we were all free to go and we were told beforehand that we would get a callback whether we were getting an offer or not within the next 2 weeks I believe, which not all companies do unfortunately. And sure enough not even a week later I got a call for a job offer there. I thought BAE was very efficient in the way that they proceeded with everything.