My NVIDIA Internship Experience
Hey there! I am Bhawna Gupta, a 4th-year student pursuing my B.Tech in CSE from National Institute of Technology Jamshedpur. Currently, I am a Technology Analyst Intern at Morgan Stanley. I have received offers from Fanatics Inc, Tekion Corp, BNY Mellon, Morgan Stanley, NVIDIA, Arcesium, Adobe, and Microsoft.
Through this blog, I will be sharing everything regarding my internship at NVIDIA in detail. So without any further delay, let’s get started.
Application process:
In March 2021, there was an off-campus drive for the Software Engineer Intern role at NVIDIA. I got to know about this opportunity from my college Training and Placement Cell. CGPA cutoff was 8 or above. My profile satisfied the eligibility criteria and hence I applied immediately.
How did I prepare?
Problem-solving skills are a must for Software Engineer roles. My mentors and seniors always stressed upon this fact. I made sure that I have a good grip over DSA. I used to practice questions on LeetCode and Interviewbit and give contests on platforms like Codechef, Codeforces, HackerEarth, and Google Kickstart. Most importantly, I remained positive all the time.
Interview Process:
The applicants were shortlisted on the basis of CV screening. My CV passed this stage and soon after, I received the OA link.
Round 1: Online Assessment (7th March 2021)
This was a 1-hour test consisting of 25 MCQs and 1 coding question. There was a negative marking and it was challenging to complete the test within 1 hour, to be honest. The whole OA was divided into 3 sections.
Section 1: 15 questions from CS fundamentals (COA, DBMS, OS, Output type questions based on pointers)
Section 2: 10 questions based on general aptitude
Section 3: 1 coding question(I had a medium-hard level DP problem)
One can practice CS fundamental MCQs on GeeksForGeeks and refer to IndiaBix for practicing aptitude questions.
Round 2: Technical Interview (9th April 2021)
Platform — Microsoft Teams
I cleared the OA round and thereafter got a mail after a few days stating that I am advancing to the Technical Interview round.
My interview lasted for an hour. There were 2 interviewers, each one asked me questions for half an hour. The interview started with our introductions.
Discussion with First Interviewer
The interviewer asked me about my projects in detail. i.e. its implementation and used tech stack. Web fundamentals -Async/Sync JS, REST APIs, HTTP, Promise, JWT authentication, and cookies were checked. All these topics were used in my project.
After discussing my projects for a while, I was given 1 coding question.
It was a leetcode easy-medium level question and I had to write the complete code (not just the function). Then I was asked questions on heaps, dangling pointers, how to avoid dangling pointers, and dynamic memory allocation. I listened to the questions carefully and then answered them accordingly. The interviewer seemed satisfied with my answers.
Discussion with Second Interviewer
The conversation started with some questions related to ML and DL. CNN, RNN, LSTM Architecture, and Model training time were a few topics that were asked to me in detail. The interviewer also asked about the use of dropout in CNN, How to avoid overfitting, and the different layers used in CNN architecture.
In the last 10 minutes, I was asked questions based on OS concepts and OOPs. Questions were related to Virtual function, Function pointer, Semaphore vs Mutex, and Run-time polymorphism. My interview got extended by 10 more mins. Non-technical stuff was discussed here.
Hours after giving the interview, I got to know from the recruiter that I was selected for a 6 months SWE internship at NVIDIA. My joy knew no bounds. My internship was in online mode and I also got PPO after my Internship Completion.
My Internship Work:
My Internship started on the 12th of July 2021 with some training and swags.
My Project was based on Voice Style Transfer (VST). I had to evaluate and implement the best model for VST, include all my observations and results in a research paper and internally present it to the team. Through the internship, I got some real-world working exposure. By working on challenging projects, I got to know more about my strengths and weakness. Not only my technical skills but my soft skills were also extensively improved during this internship.
That was all from my side. I hope this blog helped you find the information that you were looking for. If it was, hit the clap button below and follow Codess.Cafe for more such stories. PS: You can connect with me on LinkedIn & Instagram. 😊
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