Hello everyone,
I am Vinit Raj, a 3rd year undergraduate from the department of Computer Science and Engineering enrolled in its B.Tech course at IIT Kharagpur.
I am going to outline my journey through the CDC internship process. I got offers from APT portfolio and DE Shaw for the summer(2022) and finally accepted DE Shaw.
The main component or the skill needed would be Competitive Programming. Day 1 companies are leaning heavily towards cp year after year. Standard questions from leetcode and interviewbit may still pull you through but not a risk worth taking.
I knew about CP from my first year itself but didn’t give it much thought in my first year. The serious phase started in lockdown when I enrolled in Algozenith that is run by one of our department senior. This was during the third semester(September 2020) which was really hectic but I managed. Another important thing I would say is your peer group, my two buddies both got amazing offers on day 1. So, by the time CDC came around I was CM(1918) on codeforces and 2098(5*) on codechef.
Companies I got shortlisted for:
I applied for almost all companies that offered a SDE role. On day 1 I got shortlisted for 6 companies, Rubrik, DE Shaw, APT, Microsoft, Sprinklr and Quantbox.
Tests:
Rubrik: Pretty much a codeforces round all questions ranging from div2 C and div2 D, a good binary search problem, some greedy and DP as well. I solved all 4 questions but took the full 90 minutes and got shortlisted. The shortlist was very small so you needed to solve all problems i guess.
DE Shaw: 3 questions, first two were really easy but the last one was fairly difficult. It was a DP setup but we also needed to backtrack the states and find the optimal path to the answer. I was done in around 45 minutes.
APT: Pretty standard questions don’t remember exactly but shouldn’t be a problem. There were no mcqs like other HFT and Banks.
Microsoft: They changed their platform from mettle to codility this time and it is amazing to say the least. The two questions were pretty easy and no one serious enough should have a problem with it.
Sprinklr: I was expecting this test to be tough and it sure was. Surprisingly the first and last problem were known to me so I made quick work of them. but couldn’t get full marks in the second question which was on DP and printing the optimal path to answer. Doing two questions was enough to get shortlisted.
Quantbox had CV shortlisting.
Interviews:
Like most folks I couldn’t sleep much before day 1. Most interviews were on codepair or codepad ide.
Rubrik:
Round 1: It started at around 6 am but i got my first round at 7 am. A good question on DFS was asked. I made a small mistake in my approach but when the interviewer pointed it out I quickly corrected it and solved it.
Round 2: The interviewer was pretty chill and made me comfortable. The question given was fairly difficult and required binary search and DP. It was pretty long to write but finished it in time and ran a few cases. They seemed fairly impressed and moved on to the HR round.
HR Round: This was pretty short and went on smoothly but I ended up getting rejected. Getting rejected in the final round really takes a toll on your confidence, I did not know what I did wrong. But again pondering on it would have only made it worse.
DE Shaw:
I was sitting in rubrik and DE Shaw in alternate fashion as time slots luckily merged like two sorted arrays :p
Round 1: Coding questions regarding some numbers are present even number of times and one odd number of times, find the odd one and then I was asked literally all the variations of this problem, thankfully all of them are available on interviewbit.
Round 2: This was very unexpected for me as only one coding question was asked after that for around 1 hour I was asked on OOPS and in depth C++ and I mean really in depth. The software engineering course really helped me out. I was asked to design some class structures for various scenarios and then about dynamic binding, virtual functions, runtime polymorphism, virtual table and much more. Then I was asked a puzzle and I hadn’t prepared any :( , but was able to solve it after some help. And now they saw Prob Stat written on my CV which i hadn’t revised at all. So here I was sitting for an investment firm, writing prob stat on my resume and not knowing anything, not a place you want to be in :(.
But I was honest that I didn’t revise it and he did not count it against me and I was offered the internship.
APT portfolio:
I sat for APT after my Rubrik HR round and did not have any news from DE Shaw. I was pretty sad.
Round 1: The questions were known to me and were from leetcode medium section so no issues there and I progressed to the second round.
Round 2: This round was again OOPS heavy and I actually revised a bit in the small breaks I got so I was pretty fast and accurate this time. I ended up doing pretty well.
After some time I got to know I received offers from APT and DE Shaw so I stopped interviewing anymore and at the end of the day I ended up accepting from DEShaw.
Conclusion:
- For B Tech folks I would strongly suggest making up your mind by the end of year 1 about what you want to pursue and stick with it.
- If you want to aim for CDC then choose your profile a year in advance and go with it. There is no need to panic during the process however, a lot of really good companies come on Day2 and Day3 when the competition has settled a bit so weathering rejection during the initial days might be the biggest barrier.
- Choose your peer group wisely, that in itself will propel you to pretty much anything.
