Met Eireann Hydrological Data Analyst Internship

Einherjar101

Hey first post here so I hope its in the right section.

I have an interview for the Hydrological Data Analyst internship for Met Eireann coming up in a few weeks and so was wondering if anyone knew what type of questions i'd be likely to asked?

This is actually going to be my first proper interview so I want to be as prepared as I can for it.

Also does anyone know exactly what a Hydrological Data Analyst does at met eireann? I know from the application page that the job requires:

Data analysis and data handling techniques (e.g. Metview, GnuPlot). Scripting (e.g. shell scripting) and use of the Linux environment. Graphical, data analysis packages (e.g. R)

But does this just en-tale, getting data files from the various stations and plotting graphs with these programs and getting a few simple statistics out? Or will I need to actually write and manipulate programs in R and scripting shell? Will I need to brush up on my differential equations and eigenvalues and eigenvectors?

In short
Does anyone know, preferably in detail the ins and outs of what this job en-tails and what questions might be asked in an interview for it?

Thanks in advance for any answers people might be able to provide!

Robbie12

I wouldnt even worry. They're going to train you and sure after all you are working for free as its that jobsbridge one im guessing. Hence its an internship not 'a job' were you need to now your stuff and hit the ground running. Once you have the required degree those interviews are usually more chatty then competency based. They might even give you a tour!

Einherjar101

Yeah I had figured that they wouldn't expect me to know most of this stuff. But i'd really like to get this internship and I figured that it would improve my chances if I already knew some of the ins and outs of the position. Thats why im going to install linux on my old laptop and try running some of these programs they mentioned and become somewhat competent with the R coding language.

Also if they expect me to do some more advanced calculations and programing i'd like to go over some of the basics again so that im not totally lost.

Robbie12

Well you seem pretty keen and mentioning what you just said to me there will come across to them in the interview

Yep R is good (they might use MATHLAB though). I used R for rainfall time series analysis. There's loads of support for these things on youtube and stuff so you can definitely become familiar with it quite quickly.

What degree did you do out of interest?

Einherjar101

Just finished my final year exams for my Physics and astrophysics degree, and I should get my honours degree in around september or October. But as part of it ive done 2 years of math and 3 years of computer science.
So is R basically like matlab? Also any idea if labview might be useful for this position?

Robbie12

Very good. Now this could have changed but in Jan of 2012 this was the case for me: That jobs bridge scheme requires you to be on dole 3 months for some reason so when i graduated (I did engineering) I went for a jobs bridge scheme, got the interview, got offered the position annnnnd then we all realised I couldnt do it. So be careful about that.

Yea R and mathlab are very similar if you used mathlab you'll instantly get R.

Im not familiar with labview? Check out SWMM by the US EPA it might not be relevant as you cant know what they use they might even have in house software which if they do is great because you get shown how to use it.

Also once again its great you're looking into it so much, ask them about labview etc and they'll realise you've done your homework.

I just hope that jobsbridge thing doesnt affect you.

Einherjar101

I've actually been on jobseekers for the last year as I was repeating my final year externally so the im definitely eligible.
However that brings up another concern for me, I haven't actually gotten such good grades in my degree, mostly due to the fact that i've been playing catch-up for most of the math/physics stuff and also I just don't exam well. How badly might that effect my chances?