Silicon Valley mentorship club helps students ace technical interviews
The informal mentorship sessions have equipped more than 170 students with the technical, problem-solving skills needed to satisfy scrutinizing interviewers in Silicon Valley.
OAKLAND – When 25-year-old student Hanwen Wang moved to California’s Bay Area from Korea, where she had earned a master’s degree in Korean linguistics, she didn’t know the meaning of the word “algorithm” – a set of instructions designed to perform a computation.
“My background is a total non-relationship with computer science,” said Wang, who enrolled this year in a Bridge program on Northeastern University’s Silicon Valley campus geared toward students with bachelor’s degrees outside of STEM looking to gain technical skills. “I really felt lost when I came for my first semester.”
But Wang quickly caught wind of the HuskyCode Club, a volunteer matchmaking service founded by students Yi Zhang and Yue Chen that pairs older, more experienced computer science students with less experienced peers. The mentors, who Chen selects based on their compatible skill sets, give mentees one-on-one guidance through the difficult process of preparing for technical interviews, a requirement for many top tech recruiters in the competitive Silicon Valley job market and beyond.
Since its inception in November 2025, the club has paired up more than 170 Northeastern students and won the campus’s Best Club Award, Zhang said.
Students who nominated the club said it is both “technically rigorous and genuinely welcoming,” according to Karen Pryor, director of student services at Northeastern Silicon Valley.
“International students and career-changers alike described it as a place where they found confidence in their technical abilities, in speaking English, and in navigating a new environment,” Pryor said.
The informal, weekly mentorship sessions have equipped students like Wang with the technical problem-solving skills needed to satisfy scrutinizing interviewers, making it a critical resource for the heavily computer science-focused campus.
The club also has a secondary purpose: connecting international students new to California with a bustling community of like-minded peers, giving them an early social foothold and support network as they venture forth into the world of work.
“This club brings people together and gives us confidence,” said Zhang.
Technical interviews are used by technology companies to test the coding skills and quick-thinking abilities of job candidates in a high-speed, pressurized environment, Chen said. Applicants are tasked with completing timed programming challenges or system design problems while a recruiter watches their every move over a video call. The goal is to evaluate candidates’ understanding of the type of coding concepts they would be using on the job.
Just as students can take mock SAT or GRE exams, online resources exist for computer science job-seekers that simulate a technical interview environment. One of the most popular is LeetCode, a platform with thousands of practice questions that users can try and leave feedback on for others to view, Chen said.
“You are given an array of linked-lists, each linked-list is sorted in ascending order. Merge all the linked-lists into one sorted linked-list and return it,” demands one LeetCode practice question marked as “Hard.”
It can take hundreds of successful solves before a candidate feels prepared for a real technical interview, where they will be given a random assignment and asked to think on the fly, Wang said.
During her own technical interview with a small financial technology company in September, Chen was given 45 minutes to solve a real technical problem facing the company. The recruiter provided Chen with a variety of user inputs, such as phone numbers and email addresses, and asked her to create an algorithm that identified the input type and reformatted any user-entered stylistic differences into one standardized reading.
“I needed to share my screen, and the recruiter was just watching me the whole round,” Chen said. “That’s scary.”
Erica Hatzievgenakis, a professor in the College of Engineering on the Silicon Valley campus, said communication is one of the most critical skills students must learn in preparation for technical interviews.
As they work through coding problems, applicants are expected to “articulate their goal, what they did in order to complete the task, and what the outcome was,” Hatzievgenakis said. “To be able to have organized thoughts and relay the information in a concise but direct manner takes practice.”
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Over two semesters, Zhang guided mentee Wang through more than 100 LeetCode practice questions. Their in-person weekly meetings also included mock interviews and more casual conversations about life in America and the resources available to Wang on campus, she said.
“[Zhang] used a blackboard and drew pictures for me to explain certain algorithms, and also she recommended websites and books to help me to understand the more challenging topics,” Wang said. “I’m so lucky to have met her, she really taught me a lot.”
Zhang knows what it’s like to feel like a fish out of water. Before joining Northeastern and founding the Husky Code Club, she worked in hospitality management at the Disneyland theme parks in Shanghai and Orlando, then in data analysis roles in the pharmaceutical industry, she said.
Upon pivoting her career direction and working toward an information systems master’s degree, she remembers feeling frustrated practicing LeetCode by herself without any guidance. She decided to create the club to ensure her classmates could seek help from a shared community, even those on other campuses across Northeastern’s global network.
“Eventually, we will all help each other. We will see each other in the industry,” Zhang said. “Silicon Valley is a small place.”
Zhang and Chen provide HuskyCode Club mentors and mentees with access to a private job listing resource, outings to nearby tech company headquarters, group practice sessions on the Silicon Valley campus and a dedicated online discussion forum.
Though Wang said she would like to solve another 200 LeetCode questions before applying for her first tech industry position, she said HuskyCode Club has transformed her confidence.
“I really feel better compared to my first semester. I can solve the code by myself now,” she said. “It’s a big, big step for me.”
And yes, she now knows the meaning of the word algorithm.
