Merck came onto the UC Berkeley Campus in Fall 2009 during an infosession hosted by the UC Berkeley Chapter of AIChE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers). After submitting my resume via On-Campus Recruiting (OCR), I was invited for an interview at the UC Berkeley Career Center.
On the day of the interview, I was interviewed by a man with a Ph.D degree in Chemical Engineering who worked in the vaccines division. Most of the questions were behavioral, asking you to demonstrate instances in which you took charge in a team or had experience with conflict resolution within a team. Make sure to prepare examples for these behavioral-type questions beforehand. At the end of the interview, I was given an open-ended technical problem that I was asked to propose a solution to. This problem regarded the use of fermenters to produce biologics and how to detect contamination of the product or determine when was the optimal harvest times, etc. This problem was probably designed to test how you think as an engineer.
Overall, I felt that my interview went okay as I felt I could have provided a better solution to the technical problem. However, I felt my interviewer was the typical engineer stereotype in which he wasn't very engaging and didn't smile at me at all; he wasn't friendly or unfriendly, simply neutral and I was unable to tell if he was interested in me at all.
Two weeks later, I heard back and was not invited back to proceed with the Interview Process.
The MMDP program I applied for is apparently a very competitive rotational program.