I am nervous because I skimmed their experience section when I first applied.
Yeah, those tend to be wish lists. The engineer says, “It would be nice if they had some Angular, but if they’ve done some Vue then that would be good too” and the HR person simplifies it to “required Angular and Vue”. Take those lists with a grain of salt.
I honestly do not believe I should even attempt the interview since I know my qualifications are very low …
Don’t worry about that - they will read your resume and decide if you are worth their time.
… and do not wish to waste the interviewer’s time …
Let the interviewer worry about that. They pick and chose whom they wish to interview. And remember that this is an intern position - they don’t expect you to be an expert.
… but I also do not wish to make a bad name for myself when I have just started out.
I’m not sure what that means. It’s not like all there hiring managers have a centralized database where they black ball people that apply for jobs for which they are underqualified.
I mean, don’t be a jerk - don’t lie or mislead them. Tell them honestly what you’ve done, exude confidence, and don’t exaggerate too much.
What I need help with is, how to prepare for the interview.
Find out everything you can about the company and their products. On that list of techs that they use, at least find out what each of them is. Saying, “I know what .NET is but I haven’t had the opportunity to work with it yet.” sounds a lot better than “No, I’ve never heard of that before. What is that?” Go on glassdoor.com and find the company. Sometimes you can find people discussing their interviews. Sometimes they even tell you what was asked - you may not get the same question, but it’s good to get an idea.
If you have the name of the people with whom you’ll interview, look them up on linkedin, see what you can find out. If you go in there saying, “I found that article you wrote on medium intersesting…” - that would impress them.
Algorithms often come up in interviews. I always recommend the book, Cracking the Coding Interview. It’s in Java, but it’s close enough that you can get the gist.
Look for youtube videos on coding interviews and interviews in general. If you can, find someone with whom to practice interviews.
I also have a small glimmering hope that they will consider me .
That’s great. But also realize that the odds are that you will have to do a lot of interviews before you find the right job. You will have to learn to live with rejection.
Relax. In all fairness, the odds are that even if you make the final 5, there’s still only a 20% chance. But the interviews are probably not even that narrowed down. To me that’s liberating - realizing that your future is not riding on this one interview - there will be many others. Just learn from the interview.
Another thing I recommend is at the end of the interview, they usually ask if you have any questions. Think of some questions, about their product, their industry, their dev philosophy, etc. But also ask, “I’m still new to this interviewing process. Do you have any tips? Things I could have done better? Areas where I need to improve?” You’d be surprised how many people will offer some tips. One guy stayed on the phone for an extra hour just talking about things I could do to increase my odds.