Sanskar Agarwal, Dept. of EEE, reflects upon his life in IITG, and describes some milestones in his journey. He also writes about his pre-final year summer internship at Oracle, and second year research intern at IISc Bangalore.
Part I: Freshman year!
It was three years ago that my journey at IITG started. Life before college was completely different, as all of you reading this can testify. I was mesmerized by the beautiful campus — I remember being excited by the pool table in Siang, the lush green canopy from Manas to Kameng, the never-ending corridors of the cores and the beautiful afternoon weather in which we clicked photos beside the lakes. The campus was quiet since students were away on summer vacations, but the joyful thundering of my heart made up for it!
I was given the ‘Alcher hostel’- yeah Dihing! A juice centre, a canteen, a library, a TV room, a mini playground, a gym room, an indoor sports room - man, that felt like a luxury. The mess — umm let’s skip this part XD. From playing TT all night on weekends to binge-watching GOT, skipping meals and staying alive on canteen food- we grew up. (At the time, Dihing didn’t have Chicken Biryani and I ‘WAS’ a vegan.) The first-year trip to Shillong was an exciting one. In fact, the highlight of the trip was my conversion to non-vegetarianism! I have some lovely memories of my first Alcher as a part of the organizing team, and the Funniche events in Techniche, as well.
My suggestion to freshers would be to be active - take part in Kriti, Manthan. If possible, join at least one technical and one cultural club per your liking! Be it the food court or Khokha, SAC or library, core or basketball court - get out and do whatever you feel like. At the same time, never neglect your acads. It is very much possible to follow your passion while maintaining good acads.
As a senior once told me, ‘If extra-curriculars are your girlfriend, acads are your parents’.
Part II: Sophomore year
I was an active member of Cadence, the dance club, in my third semester. Apart from learning new dance styles, my time with Cadence has filled me with lots of nostalgia — the birthday celebrations, the dance workshops, the practice sessions: I made infinite memories through the flash mob in Techniche to the Inter IIT Cult Meet held at IIT Roorkee. We would practice for 10 hours a day, and would often sleep in the dance room itself! During this time, I also led the dance module from my hostel in Manthan. Our lobby took a trip to Sikkim during the midsem break, as well!
Soon arrived Techevince. I was a part of the computer vision team in Electronics Club and our team won two prizes out of three in that event. It was a very meaningful experience working all night long in the club room, building everything from scratch. The positive energy you get when you see others putting in so much effort is what keeps you going in spite of repeated failures. I clearly remember trying to build an FM transmitter and receiver with Ayul over and over again in spite of innumerable failures. Though the project wasn’t successful, our spirit emerged triumphant!
Part III: Research internship at IISc Bangalore
Like several others, I was trying to get a research internship for the summer vacation after sophomore year. One would need letters of recommendation, a statement of purpose, transcripts and referrals to apply for research interns. I sent mails to professors whose work I found interesting. I used mail trackers, sent out properly timed mails such that they would have a higher chance of being seen. (Professors usually check their email at mornings and rarely on weekends.) I did my second year summer internship at IISc Bangalore.
IISc is a great institute, and it was even more exciting since it was my first internship. I learnt a lot during my stay there. Meeting new people from diverse institutions and working with one of the best lab groups in the country in the field of Deep Learning was wonderful. The weather in Bangalore is lovely. I stayed in a PG near the campus. The place was bustling with more than 50 small to medium cafes and restaurants. Though a student-residential area (like Kota), it was constantly ferried by Swiggy, Zomato and Uber Eats delivery agents! Within a short time, I fell in love with the city, and it was difficult to go back!
I would strongly suggest sophomores to do a second-year internship. It gives you a lot of exposure in terms of your career choices and helps clear the dilemma of pursuing research ahead. In general, summer and winter breaks are very important. Do enjoy them to the fullest, but also make time for developing some skills which will help you in the near future.
Part IV: On-campus interns (Pre-final year)
Oracle came in a spot round after the first week. I had done a research intern in my sophomore summer, so I couldn’t practice much of coding. Hence, my biggest challenge was to get through the coding round. During my intern at IISc, I practised coding on InterviewBit in my free time. It was in the first two weeks of the fifth semester that I rigorously worked on my coding skills. Oracle’s test was a difficult one, enhanced by the fact that the test pattern was completely unfamiliar. In the test, the first round was MCQ-based and had different sections. Some important topics would be -
- Trees - AVL, Red Black trees, BSTs
- Databases
- Algorithms and flowcharts
- Operating systems
- English
About 20–25 of us were shortlisted for interviews. The interview was to begin in 5 hours. The first round was a coding round wherein we were given two simple questions and asked to write the code on a paper, along with the time and space complexities. I was asked to explain my code. I was able to explain my approach well and the interviewer looked impressed. Then he gave me a puzzle to solve, and thanks to my practice on GFG, I could do it.
About half of us advanced to the next round. The next technical round discussion was mostly on OOPS where the interviewer asked me about different concepts of OOPs and told me to give a real life example of its implementation. It was a detailed discussion wherein we discussed upon overloading, inheritance, compilers, interpreters, scripting and programming languages, etc. It was a decent round, but I had the gut feeling that I wouldn’t make it through as I fumbled at a few places during the interview!
My projects were based on computer vision and my previous intern on Deep Learning and GANs. I was hoping that the discussion would span that direction, but I guess I was unlucky on that front. Almost nothing was asked from my courses or projects or my DL intern. I guess it wasn’t the profile they were targeting. (Oracle primarily is a database centric organization with recent advances in Cloud infrastructure).
I couldn’t make it through to the HR round and went back to hostel. It was about 2:30 AM when I came back. I had hardly reached when I received a call to attend HR round! I went through two HR rounds. I was asked how I felt about my interviews. I honestly replied that I could have done much better. The final HR round was with the VP of the company. I received the selection mail an hour later!
Part V: Virtual intern experience
The intern at Oracle was cut short to 28 days due to the pandemic, and it was virtual. The first day was dedicated to system setup while the next two were boot-camp days. Weekends were off, and we had regular HR sessions throughout the month. I was assigned to the Identity Management team. The team was quite friendly and we worked at our own liberty. We did not have any restriction with respect to working hours. They didn’t pressurize us for results as well. The main focus was on learning new tech and getting a feel of corporate culture. We slowly blended in. I learnt new tech stacks including docker, kubernetes,etc. I also developed a stronger hold of DBMS, JAVA,etc.
We worked on two projects - the first was a database management one wherein we had to identify the redundancies in the stored data and code to purge those. The second was on CI/CD pipeline wherein we worked upon an upcoming product. Due to non-disclosure agreement, I can’t get into the particulars.
They also organized a coding hackathon for interns. It was a good experience. There were 9 questions (medium/hard). I could do 4. I along with 20 other interns progressed to the next round. It was a development-based hackathon. We were given some problem statements related to COVID 19, and we had to come up with an application or website solution for the same.
We were divided into 7 teams of 3 each. It was quite hectic for me. I had never done development before and I quickly went through basic HTML and CSS the previous night. The hackathon began at 6:30 in the morning and went until 8:30 pm! We did a decent job nonetheless and I was happy with the experience.
One striking thing about the internship was the dedication of the company towards us. Even within this short duration, we built a rapport with the team. There were regular interactive events with the entire intern batch and lecture talks, fun events, etc. It was a good experience overall. The work was entirely different from my past experiences and was also quite enriching in the sense that we interacted with so many peers from such diverse backgrounds.
It was our first foray into the corporate culture, working on real life projects…
We didn’t have much time, so I felt that the internship was mostly focused on learning rather than implementation. We however completed our work ahead of time and the mentors were quite happy with our performance. We received positive feedback from them along with PPOs.
