Analyst Intern at Mastercard | Sajal Kumar Goyla
Hi, I am Sajal Kumar Goyla, a 4th-year Electronics and Communication Engineering undergrad at IIT Guwahati. I have received and accepted the PPO offer from Mastercard, and today, I’ll be sharing my preparation, experience working as an Analyst intern and my knowledge and tips for the readers for acing your upcoming intern/placement season.
After I joined college, I was introduced to ML and AI by the IITG.ai club and was fascinated by the field. I did not join the club but started reading about the area on the internet. It was only after I got introduced to the CnA club by one of the hostel seniors that I got very keenly interested in learning about the field in great depth, along with all the technicalities. I decided to join the club at once, so I went for its interview. But I did not perform well and got rejected. But due to my developed interest in this field, I continued studying about this in my spare time. During the summer holidays after 1st year, CnA club started their summer analytics course, and I joined the course, which started my technical learning journey in this field. After completing the course with a good rank, I was allowed to reapply to join the club, and this time, I got selected. After this, I continued the club for a year and learned many things about consulting and analytics.
Internship Preparation
By the beginning of the 4th semester, I had done Andrew Ng’s course on ML/AI and had a firm grasp of python. Apart from this, I had done a part of the specialisation course on deep learning. But I had yet to do much coding. So, after beginning the 4th semester, I started learning DSA and Algorithms in C++ and finishing the specialization course in parallel. I began with CodeChef and HackerRank and practiced majorly from there. Later on, I shifted to leetcode and interview bit. I did not give many contests. But I suggest you give it if you want to improve your time management skills. During that time, I was in a dilemma between the Analyst and SDE fields. I did an app development project but later shifted to web development as I initially found it exciting and easier to understand. So, I continued doing bits in both domains but focused majorly on the analyst domain. I also studied probability from the net, along with a departmental probability course.
My CV
I prepared only one CV for my intern season, which would suffice for both the Analyst and SDE roles. To strengthen my CV, I started looking for off-campus internships by the end of 2nd year. I applied for a research internship in a Hyderabad company, Envision Pvt. Ltd. My work there was to study various methods to analyze time series data as an image using multiple transformation methods. I researched from different research papers and then compared them based on the model score for the anomaly detection problem. Apart from this, I made a chatting app similar to WhatsApp in android studio. I also made an advertisement drone as a part of Techevince’20 under the aeromodelling club. Other small projects included a Line following robot, a Flappy bird game with and without AI playing it, a sudoku solver and an Image-to-text app using OCR. As far as my PORs are concerned, I was an MMC member in the first year and then the technical secretary of the hostel for the next two years. I was an associate in the CnA club and CRM Executive in Alcheringa’21.
Test and Interview
Mastercard came in spot 2. I was stressed and exhausted by that time. Initially, Mastercard only came for the sde role but later (sometime after that day only), introduced the analyst profile. So, the test included only two medium-level coding questions. They were a bit tricky but not tough. So, with some thinking, I solved them both. All the shortlisted candidates were then given a choice between the two profiles. Since my preparation was better in the analyst profile, I opted for it.
My interview comprised only 1 round, which was with the director of my team (Analytics and Automation). It started with my introduction and some general questions like tell us about Mastercard, the effect of lockdown etc. Then she moved on to my CV, where I was asked in detail about my previous internship, from all the transformation methods I found in various research papers, their technicalities and implementation to the multiple models I built and metrics I used for comparison and the conclusion of my research. Then she asked me briefly about my PORs and my responsibilities to check my management skills. Then she moved on to some typical HR questions, which you can easily find on the net, and then ended the interview by asking me if I had any questions to ask. My advice to the readers is always to ask a question or two. It has a positive impact on them regarding your interest in their company. They had mentioned two software they use in their team in the job description. So, I asked her about it, and then the call ended. I was confident about my performance as my interview went smoothly. Later all the shortlisted candidates were asked to give a pymetric test. While giving my pymetric test, I started receiving calls and messages from my friends, which I saw after the pymetric test, congratulating me on my selection. I must say, it was the best feeling ever!
Offline Internship Experience
Before I begin, I must say that working in offline mode is far better than working in online mode. This is based on my experience in both online and offline internships. The very first day I entered my office, I was flabbergasted by the office and its advanced tech and infrastructure. I was given three IDs, two on the day of joining and one other a week later. One was a building access card which I had to swipe to enter or leave the building; the other was my ID card with my name and photo on it, which was used to open any door or room I wanted to enter, be it any entrance gate, game room, toilets, etc., and the third one was a vending machine card which could be used on any of the various vending machines placed on every floor inside the refreshment room along with coffee machine and water dispenser in which Rs 500 were added automatically by the company every month.
The highlight of the office for me was its infrastructure. One could enjoy a brilliant ambience with the Mastercard color hue on the walls, and the floors were beautifully decorated with indoor plants and beautiful pictures. All the lights were motion sensor-based and would turn on automatically whenever you entered its radius. The game room facilities were excellent with a pool table, table tennis, carrom and foosball table scattered across the three buildings namely tower A, tower B and tower D. One of the cool things I found was the booking system of the meeting room, where either using the interactable panel outside the meeting rooms or using outlook, you could book any meeting room along with anyone in the company from anywhere. Another great thing in the office was the work culture, work ethics and approachability to people inside the office.
The people there were amiable and supportive. You could easily approach any of them irrespective of their position, be it a fellow employee, director, VP, etc., and they would be happy to talk to you and help you out if they had free time. You could also use Outlook, wherein you could check their schedule for the day in the calendar and book any free slot with them. My team members were just fantastic. My manager was so friendly that he never felt like a manager to me but rather a friend whom I could approach without hesitation. A few team members even took me out for dinner the first weekend after joining the office. Also, later that month, the entire team went for a team dinner, given by our team director. Our team followed a fundamental principle of daily stand-up and a sprint to remain productive and aligned towards our goal. The daily stand-up was 30–45 mins every day except Wednesday at 12:30 pm, when we had to present our plans for the day to our team and finish it that day. And the sprint was a bi-weekly meet held on Fridays after every two weeks, where the entire team would present their plans for the coming fortnight. Lastly, I would like to add about the fantastic canteen the office had. It was a massive canteen with various outlets on an entire floor where you could get almost anything you wanted to eat. The views around the office were also great. In a nutshell, it was a great office with great people and excellent work principles.
My Project and Presentation
Me and Shashwat (a fellow intern with me from our college) worked on the same project. The name of the project was Invoice Processing Automation. In this project, we were given many invoices and some target fields like invoice number, PO number, date of invoice, etc., which we had to extract from the invoice. Since all the invoices were in different formats with a different number of pages, no brute force approach would work. Therefore, we were asked to work on an ML model to extract the given target fields from large invoices with reasonable accuracy and automate the entire process. That’s it; we worked tirelessly on this project for the next two months, searching and trying different methods to do so and, in the end, cracked it with a model which gave great accuracy in the extraction process. Since this was a long-term project, we were only asked to work on a few significant fields.
Now, when it comes to the presentation, we started working on it less than a week before the presentation date. It took us a while to make the presentation content-rich and visually appealing. Then we started with the rehearsals and started taking feedback first from fellow team members, then the manager and the Mumbai team and finally from the director of our team. Then came the presentation day, directors, VPs and senior team members from Pune and the USA office were to join the meeting. Everyone joined except the VP, who had to drop out due to some urgent work. Since we had to accommodate the difference in time zone, the meeting was scheduled for around 6:30 in the evening. The meeting went well, and we received tremendous positive reviews from everyone. Then a day later, the meeting with the VP alone was also scheduled, and he was also very impressed with our work and asked if we could stay for a few more months to continue working on the same project. This review gave me much confidence about the usefulness of the work we had done in the past two months, and I started expecting a positive reply from them regarding the PPO. Finally, I got the PPO offer, which I accepted.
My advice for readers
I would advise the following things to the readers:
· Practice, practice, practice. Practice as much DSA and algorithms as possible because this is the key to getting shortlisted for any company’s interview.
· Do relevant projects to the profile you’ll be applying for. Also, try and go for unique projects that cover as many topics as possible in a single project.
· When it comes to the analyst profile, Kaggle is your best friend. Try and participate in more and more Kaggle hackathons, as it will improve your critical-solving skills.
· Have a firm hold on python along with NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, etc., as these are your best friends in this profile.
· Do study the Andrew Ng course on ML/AI and the deep learning specialization course.
· Attending the summer analytics course by CnA is a great way to start.
· Analytics Vidhya and Towards Data Science are excellent references you should refer to.
· Maintain a good CPI; 8+ cpi is my advice to all because you don’t want to miss any interview because of your less cpi during CV shortlisting. Also, hold some good PORs as they reflect your character and management skills during an interview.
· Get your CVs scrutinized by as many seniors as possible, especially regarding placements.
· Don’t fear failures. During the internship season, don’t give up if you don’t get an internship during the first few days. Trust in your preparation, keep working hard, and you’ll secure a good job through an internship or placement.
