“I looked on Wikipedia.”
I had a surprise phone interview for an internship while in college. After talking for an hour, the interviewer asked if he could call me tomorrow “and we’ll talk about RF.” I said, “Sure,” but I know my voice was shaking because I hadn’t even heard of RF. He dropped me a clue, saying that I should have learned it in the Electrical Fields and Waves class (I was enrolled at the time; it was mid-semester.)
So what did I do? I picked up my textbook. I read the table of contents and found “Radio Frequency,” which Google confirmed was “RF.” Unfortunately, it was toward the end of the book in the portion we weren’t scheduled to study.
So I decided I’d learn it another way. Very, very quickly. There aren’t a lot of ways to learn a broad topic overnight. Wikipedia’s one of the few I know.
Radio frequency - Wikipedia is much shorter, now. I think it has been broken down into subtopics. Then, it had the math and science I needed to know. It took me hours to read the long article, stopping to make sure I understood each point.
So when he called the next day, expecting me to be clueless, I said, “I looked up RF. We don’t study it in EE 331; it’s in the half of the book we won’t cover. So I looked on Wikipedia.”
He laughed a happy, surprised laugh. Then he started testing what I’d just learned.
He offered me an internship. I ended up with multiple offers and turned his down, but that was one of the more interesting, dynamic interviews I’ve ever had.
