Optum Data Scientist Interview Questions

This post is about an interview experience for a data scientist position at Optum. It could be useful if you are going through or having one upcoming for a similar position at Optum or UnitedHealth Group. 

Optum, Inc. is an American healthcare services provider with business interests encompassing technology and related services, pharmacy care services and various direct healthcare services. It has been a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group since 2011. And Optum seems to contribute the biggest portion of the UnitedHealth's profits, and has been growing very fast in the past years.

After submitting the CV for the position, I got a call from HR to arrange the interview, and there are two rounds of interview in total:

• technical interview
• behavior interview

Technical interview

The interview consists of two data scientists - one principle and one senior. 

Followed by a brief introduction about each, there was a project description section to describe a data science project has been done in your previous work experience. And there will be some questions delving into the details based on the project description you gave. 

The second part was about a mock project simulation, which has no right or wrong answer, but rather to understand how your thinking process works when you starting a new data science project. And there can be some questions based on your answers as well.

Finally, there can be a couple of technical questions related to data science and machine learning. It seems the interviewers have prepared a set of questions need to be covered. 

At the end, there can be some time for you to ask a couple of questions regarding the position and the company. Overall, the people look nice and friendly during the interview, and the interview difficulty is reasonable.

The interviewers were gentle and kind. However, the feedback process seems not satisfactory. After  more than 10 days, there was no feedback and no update on the job dashboard and I inquired about the feedback of the interview. An HR person said there will be updates and they will get back to me, but it turns out there is no update at the end and after a while I found the job board status is also silently changed to "No longer under consideration" without sending a rejection email.

Questions to prepare for academic job interviews

This post summarizes a list of questions that can be asked in your academic job interviews. If you are already passed the CV screening process and landed to an interview, it is already a great progress as you might be in the limited number of candidates out of hundreds of applicants. 

On top of your great progress so far, the interview normally aims to find out whether you are a good "FIT" of the job post that you have applied, and whether you are a good colleague, mentor, and teacher that the University is looking for with a set of prepared questions with a limited time. Therefore, we need to try to meet the requirements that the interviewers looking for with short and neat answers.

Interview is indeed a nervous situation, but remember, it is also a situation with new opportunities, and, it is OK to be not perfect.

In the following, we have a set of curated interview questions that might be useful to think of and prepare before your interviews, which are categorized into four aspects below:

• General questions
• Teaching related questions
• Research related questions
• Questions related to admin duties

General questions

• Introduce yourself 
• Why are you excited about the position?
• Why you choose to apply our institution?
• Describe the skills you have that will make you a good lecturer?
• How do you organize your day?
• When are you available to start? 

Teaching

• Your teaching philosophy 
• What’s your teaching style as a Lecturer? Tell us about your teaching style
• Describe the skills you have that will make you a good lecturer?
• What can you teach? What would you like to teach? What do you want to teach?
• What experiences do you have working with and teaching diverse students?
• Do you think you have diverse teaching experience?
• How do you feel about teaching other foundamental courses that might out of your expertise?
• If you design the degree, what kind of modules will be there to construct it?
• What do students say about your teaching?
• Tell me what you like and dislike about teaching, and in particular, being a University lecturer?
• What is the difference or relationship between traditional algorithms and ML algorithms?
• Tell us how you deal with a classroom of students with different abilities and levels of motivation?
• How do you deal with developing a new course?
• What types of projects can students do in your group?
• What are your thoughts on technology in the classroom?
• Tell me what you like and dislike about teaching, and in particular, being a University lecturer?
• How will you deal with less motivated students?
• How do you deal with disruptive students in the classroom?
• Share some specific successes and failures in the classroom
• If you could develop a new course, what would it be?
• What is your teaching related experience?
• What is your supervision related experience?
• What is the difficult part for you during educational experience? 
• What did you learn about it?
• What is your opinion about online/offline learning?
• What is your opinion about assessment formats such as assignments and final term exam styles?
• What are the final exam covers that assignments do not cover?
• What have you learned about our student body that excites you/concerns you?
• If you are teaching 3 courses and a faculty member comes to say if you can teach 4th one for help due to an emergency? What will you do?

Research

• What kind of research metrics do you think is the best for evaluating a faculty, e.g., h-index or impact factors?
• How do you select good PhD candidates?
• What is your approach to mentoring?
• Understanding of national funding landscape
• What types of fundings you would like to apply for your research
• How do you choose the venues to submit for your research
• What are top venues that you didn't make it but would like to have in the future
• What is your top paper and why, what is the impact / What do you think are your most significant research accomplishments?
• What do you consider to be your best paper/work and why? What are your most important publications? What are the two best papers of yours?
• What did it change about the way people approach the field?
• What has been the impact of your research?
• Who here might you collaborate with?
• What are the resources will you need to be successful? 
• What papers do you have coming through in the next year?
• What is the status of the grant you listed on your CV?
• How will you excite students about your research?
• What do you see in 10 years? Where is your research heading in the next 5-10 years?
• What new techniques/approaches will you be developing?
• What is innovative about your research? 
• How is your work distinct from your supervisor’s/principal investigator’s? How intellectually independent are you? How will you distinguish yourself from your mentor?
• What influences have you been exposed to?  Who has influenced you the most?
• Do you think you have enough breadth of experience?
• What has been your role so far in developing research ideas and carrying them forward?
• If we gave you the position, what might go wrong? How will you manage the risks?

Admin duties 

• What kind of admin duties are you aware of and would like to contribute? What department/school committee work interests you?
• What kind of admin duties have you contributed to?
• What do you know about our University’s EDI policies

In this post, we have summarized a list of interview questions for those who are seeking academic jobs with respect to general, teaching, research, and admin duties. Hope the list will have you to some extent with your faculty job search.

If you have other interesting questions worth to mention during your academic job interviews that might be helpful for others, please also leave a comment below.