Internship drive season

 

April to August 2021.

I sat down to write this article over the summer to capture my journey during the internship drive season.

So back at the end of April, I started to leetcode again. I had first begun Leetcoding to prep for my google STEP interview in January. But that was hardly 10 days or rigorous problem-solving. Though it didn't make me capable enough to solve any question, it gave me an insight into all kinds of popular questions that are asked. To be honest, after covering a certain breadth of questions you can discover the pattern and probability of the type of questions that show up in Tests and interviews.

Topics like 2 pointers, knapsack(DP),  Binary search, Trees, Maps and graphs hold the most frequent flyer miles. Anyway, I didn't practice much until April then as I was busy with the College Semester, only relying on solving the DSA weekly assignment problems to maintain my skills.

In April I probably ended up solving 70-90 questions only and from May onwards I was busy with a couple of Internships so I had no time to practice. 

Internship season began at the end of July, during with I still hadn't got time to brush up my skills.

But that gave me a jumpstart to start prep; I was practising 4-5 questions per day, covering topic by topic sometimes or company by company. 

Three-four days later, Google sent us invites for taking its test and I had the misfortune to draw the craziest question in addition to being not that well prepared. So that didn't work out. :(. 

But now I had a buffer to prepare for the next Tests which were a week away. I continued the 5-6 question per day streak. I should make it clear that I was doing Medium level questions which had a 45-55 % acceptance rate so that they were of a good level to revise concepts as well as upskill. 

I had no interest to participate in Code Nation or DE shaw or Schrodinger, the next 3 companies that came as the work these firms do dint seem interesting to me, so I just gave the test to see the kind of questions that came, dint put much effort in solving. 

Next came Salesforce and Arcesium; These two I was really interested in so I gave a good/decent test attempt but alas didn't make it through as I still wasn't as prepared as I should have been. 

Now it's mid-August. My internships end, I have probably done 30-40 questions until now. But I start to pick up pace as I have more free time. I am able to solve the questions faster now, about 15 mins per question.

The next firm to arrive was Devrev.ai. This was a start-up but was very well funded and had a good team so I was really interested in this process. I felt that the work would be very interesting and the experience would be one-of-a-kind. 

The first round was resume shortlisting. I was pretty confident I would get through so I wasn't very worried. But when the results came out, only 24 people were shortlisted and I wasn't one of them. My heart fell as I wanted this a lot. But anyway continued prep for the next company, Microsoft.

The 24 people who got shortlisted took the test the day later in the evening, and the same night I was told that my name was accidentally left out of the shortlist for Devrev(IKR! what are the odds), and they wanted to schedule a test for me the next morning before the interviews began. So I agreed to take the test, but when I got the email with the test link they said I had to finish the test by 7 is the next morning. It was already 11pm, the Devrev application form had 2 long essays to write, and by the time I finished it was midnight, 

I took the test from 12 AM to 2 AM, with 4 coding questions and 16 MCQs. MCQs were very easy and I breezed through them. I did 2/4 of the coding questions and finished the other 2 just under the time limit, maybe had 15 mins left. But it was 1:45 in the morning, I couldn't think anymore, 2 test cases were failing in the 2 questions. I think I managed to debug the 3rd question. With 5 mins left and 2 test cases failing in the 4th question, I submitted as it was way too tiring and I was tired and sleepy. 

I thought since I gave the test at such an un-human time, they'll cut me some slack and I'll probably make it through but alas nope. I guess they were looking for a perfect score. :( This disappointment hit hard but well, moved on to the next test. Microsoft was on the 24th of August, test was tricky but did the questions. I had 3 days to prepare for the interviews. And this was the time I ramped up the Problem Solving practice. 3 days, did maybe 15-20 questions per day, revised the theory and the concepts. 

The first interview was very easy, a simple 2 pointer question and unbound knapsack problem were asked. The interviewer also asked about my internships and the projects and the learning outcomes. The interviewer was an engineering manager at Microsoft. This was a very pleasant experience. 

I got called for the next round 10 mins later. This was hard. the question was a complicated string manipulation question that took the entire hour to solve which too many corner cases to cover with complicated logic. I thought I was doing really bad but the interviewer assured me I was doing fine. He was a level senior to the previous interviewer. Apart from the question we spoke about my projects and work experience.

Thankfully I passed, next was the AA round, I don't know what it stands for but I think it's HR round type. Here the interviewer was a site lead of Microsoft IDC Hyderabad. He asked me to describe anyone project and I picked P.S. It's easy as it was the most impactful project I had done and was easy to explain and I knew it thoroughly. I asked them if I could just screen share and show and he agreed, and I gave him the tour and he asked certain things like what would I change, tech details. He asked a few more HR questions and was satisfied with my answers. Next I was asked a really easy LinkedList problem, where I had to swap adjacent nodes. I did it in 8-9 mins and then the interview ended. The first interview started at 9 am and the last interview ended at 12:30 pm. 

But at 4pm, the results were declared and I was offered the position for summer 2022. Honestly, I was just relieved I dint have to Leetcode anymore. 

Moral of the story: You don't need to Leetcode for 2-3 years or even 5-6 months. With 30-45 (in my case 25) days of decent practice, it's easy to get a good SI. Conceptual skills are only 30% of the game, 70 % is being able to talk through the interview I felt, but tech skills are the only thing that'll get you through the door, so focus on that first and then soft skills. 

Thanks for reading

Good day