OR-Path – OR Career Roadmap #7

Welcome back to OR-Path!

This series is about navigating Operations Research careers inside real organizations — where constraints, incentives, and hiring signals matter more than theory.

This edition tackles a recurring question: what should you prepare when your future teammates interview you? My view is straightforward: be ready to explain the projects you chose to put on your CV.

So let’s get straight to it.

This is a conversation with future teammates about your experience, distinct from an HR screen or coding test. Your interviewers may still go deep technically.

For each highlighted project, review the problem, your contribution, the methods, and the outcome. Recover the reasoning behind your choices.

If an old detail escapes you, acknowledge it honestly; don’t let “I don’t remember” become your entire answer.

“We used column generation” is a starting point. Expect follow-ups: Why that approach for this routing problem? What alternatives did you consider? Did you test a heuristic? What trade-off mattered most?

Separate what you actually tested from what you would explore today. Explain how constraints, data, runtime, or solution quality shaped the decision.

Be specific about the language and tools you used, what you personally implemented, and how the solution was evaluated.

Then explain what happened: Did users adopt it? Did planning time fall? Was it only a prototype? State the actual outcome and its limits. A result that never reached production is still worth discussing clearly.

Use an LLM to rehearse questions or organize your notes. During the interview, explain the work in your own words. Reading a generated script gives your future colleagues little opportunity to assess your reasoning.

If your experience is academic, prepare to discuss your paper or research project: your contribution, assumptions, experiments, limitations, and what practical use would require. Don’t invent business impact.

Choose two projects from your CV. Practice a short explanation of each, then ask someone (either a person or a LLM) to challenge your choices.

You should be able to connect the problem, your decisions, your implementation, and the evidence. That is the conversation to prepare for.

Until next time 👋
Ricardo
OR-Path