Samsung Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Panicked on a String Palindrome and Failed the Screen

I'm new to industry and to LeetCode, not a CS major, and I recently gave up on academia to try to switch into industry. I got lucky and landed a first-round interview with Samsung, one hour, with a senior staff interviewer. The whole thing was scheduled in a rush — the confirmation email with the interview link only went out the day before, and it wasn't until I saw the coding link that I realized there'd be a coding portion. Because the position description was aimed at materials design, I'd just assumed it wouldn't be CS-track. I spent a whole day cramming on data processing and basic ML code, stuff I'd used a lot in my research before.

Interview process: the first half hour was just chatting about my background with the interviewer, who was really nice. Then it moved into the coding test. I joked that it was my first coding test, and the interviewer encouraged me, saying it wouldn't be too hard. The coding question was basic LeetCode — a string palindrome. But I hadn't really coded with strings since undergrad, and I panicked in the moment, made mistake after mistake, kept deleting and rewriting. The result: I failed, pretty resoundingly. The interviewer was patient through all of it though. Having someone that nice made me feel even more guilty about how it went.
Right after it ended I bought a LeetCode premium subscription and started grinding. Turns out industry interviews really do weigh coding heavily.