Programmer - Good (non-code) interview questions for college intern candidates [closed]

Programmer Question

Possible Duplicates:

What's a good non-programming interview question when hiring a programmer?

C# - Programmer Challenge for Interviews - Programming to an Interface & Patterns

Next week I'm beginning several rounds of interviews for a company wide technical intern program. Many of these candidates are only sophomores or juniors and have little programming experience. They can do basic data structures, regurgitate algorithms and the like, but they have little or no professional coding experience in an enterprise environment.

So, given that fact, I try and ask questions that show a passion for computing and software development. Basically what I want to know is, do these people love the idea of being a software developer? I have a few questions that I always like asking to see if the candidate gets excited or passionate about, but I'm looking for more. I have some simple language agnostic coding questions too, but I'm not trying to focus on those. We're only going to have these people for three months so we really just want someone who is ready to jump in any try anything (while being appropriately cautious :)

Here are the questions I generally use:

• Why did you pick computer science as a major? Why do you want to be a software developer?


• What do you do in your spare time that relates to software development?


• What is your favorite piece of software (or website) - why?


• (Followup) What is one thing you'd change about your favorite piece of software?


• What is your least favorite piece of software (or website) - why?


• Tell me about your favorite software development project or assignment

Does anyone have any other questions they use quite a bit for this purpose? Like I said, I'm looking for passion (or dare I say nerdiness :) but I don't want to get too technical.

Update This question was closed as a duplicate. I don't feel as though the "duplicates" answered the specific question I was asking. Yes, they asked about non-technical interview questions, but I'm specifically wondering about intern recruiting. 20 plus responses seems to indicate that there are plenty of people willing to respond.

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