Altogether I had 3 phone interviews. The first one was extremely pleasant - I was asked to tell about myself and my background, we talked about my experience with the equipment we have at my school lab, that I worked on for couple of years. Second interview was in 2 weeks with a director of the department and it was scary – I didn’t think I passed it. I was asked if I have experience on everything related to composites: layup, curing, testing (3pb,4pb, DCB, OHT), NDE – CT inspection, volumetric image rendering, methods of image reconstruction ( my proposed PhD topic) , how would I deal with artifacts, how would I set the technique for scanning, what other kinds of NDE I’m familiar with – ultrasound, shearography etc, then when it comes to failure analysis how would I model the crack, would I be comfortable working with methods other than FEM ( about 16 questions in 20 min !!!) – for those of you who are in the Structures field, you know each of those areas are very broad and you cannot be a specialist on everything. So I answered honestly what I knew or worked with before, what I’ve dealt with only in the scope of my school coursework and what I never had experience with. I was asked whether it bothers me to come from a purely academic environment to a place like SpaceX, where they build things and everything is very hands on. I said that I would love to finally see how things are built in industry after reading/ researching so much about them. It was hard to tell if my interviewer was happy with my answers, and I didn’t know if I should have acted like I if knew all those areas – in any case at the end I was asked to name what I like to do most at my work (her goal was to identify which department my skills would fit best). I got a call in 2 weeks to schedule a 3rd phone interview which was, like my 1st one, very pleasant and laid back, took about 15 minutes and 5 more to discuss when I am available to come for my internship.