You're a computer science undergraduate preparing for your first internship interviews. You've learned about the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) but struggle to understand why interviewers ask about leadership and taking initiative. As a CS student, you've focused on building technical skills through coursework and personal coding projects, assuming that programming ability is what matters most for software engineering internships.

Your Current Background:

• Second-year CS student with solid grades in CS1, CS2, and Data Structures courses
• Personal projects: a basic calculator app, a simple web portfolio, and some LeetCode practice
• Strong programming fundamentals in Java and Python
• Limited experience beyond individual assignments and coursework
• Most comfortable working on clearly defined programming problems with specific requirements

The Interview Challenge:

During your first internship interview, the interviewer asks: "Tell me about a time when you took initiative to solve a problem or improve a situation."

Your Response:

"I'm still early in my CS program, so I mostly just focus on completing my assignments well and learning new programming concepts. I haven't really been in situations where I needed to take initiative because my professors give us clear instructions for everything. But I always turn in my homework on time and my code usually works correctly."

Interviewer's Follow-up:

"Can you think of any situation - in your CS courses, personal projects, or even outside of computer science - where you saw a problem and took action to address it?"

Your Realization:

You're struggling to answer because you've approached your CS education as a series of individual assignments to complete rather than opportunities to identify problems and create solutions.