In this article, Yogesh Yadav from dept. of EEE, shares his journey as Overall Coordinator of Tech-Board and experience of interning with Walmart Labs.
Internship Experience :
Deciding about your career, what we really wanna do in our life is a tough call for everyone. Some people will say “what’s the big deal, just go for the thing which amazes you”. But what if there are several things that amazes you or there are none at all. Here comes the crucial part where you have to rule out some options narrowing down your set of choices or explore a bit more to find that thing which really interests you.
After exploring different things during your first two years in college, Internship season brings that same dilemma in front of you when you have to give a serious thought about your career options and focus upon just one. I was also going through the same situation. My 2nd year projects were mostly based on Electronics and Robotics while I was also doing HackerRank simultaneously. Not being able to choose one option, initially I started preparing for both core electronics and SDE. But since I didn't have any projects specifically for SDE profile, I started a project on App development during the summer before Internships. Although it is a simple utility App, it feels nice to install your own app on your phone. I really enjoyed developing that app. It was after this project when I was quite sure that I wanted to do an SDE intern only.
My overall point here is that you don't need to take stress to decide what you want to do, it is very natural to be uncertain at this stage. To know what is good for you, you just need to explore a bit more on the fields you are interested in, take your time, you will surely get clarity with time.
Internship Preparation:
Deciding which path to choose is one part, you also have to be prepared to take that path. I will tell you my preparation experience for SDE intern.
- First and foremost point is to practice as many coding questions as you can. I started doing coding questions from my second year on Hackerrank. It is really a nice platform to start practicing with. You can find plenty of questions there in a sorted manner, from easy to hard, from "Hello world" to graphs. By practicing different questions, you don't just learn coding skills but it also helps you learn problem solving skills.
- When internships came closer, I started preparing on Interviewbit. It is an all in one, compact and concise platform for preparation. It consists of questions from all important topics and major companies. You can start it with your friends also (ask them, most of them must be doing it already 😄). Then, you can discuss the questions with them where you got stuck, discuss the different approaches to a question. No doubt, it is one of the best platforms for preparation.
- Practicing questions is not enough, you do have to gain some in depth knowledge about DS & Algorithms to crack technical interviews of good companies. For that I have studied articles from Geeks for geeks. For company wise preparation also, GfG helps you get an idea of the type of questions asked and interview pattern of that particular company.
- A good project relevant to SDE helps you a lot to give you an edge over others. I was in the middle of my preparation when everybody was doing coding questions at full pace, and I was confused about starting a project at that time giving less time to coding questions. But now I feel very fortunate that I chose to do a project on App development. It doesn't just add a significant block on your CV, but also gives a topic over which the interviewer can talk about.
- To improve your speed and concentration, you can also do some contests on codeforces and codechef. I have also practiced some online contests.
Walmart Interview Experience:
- The first step of the selection process was the online coding test. It majorly consists of multiple choice questions on Data structures, DBMS and Operating system, and one coding question which is based upon bit manipulation. 14 out of 250 people were shortlisted for interview rounds.
- Walmart took two interviews. In the First interview, he majorly asked me questions on my CV. He discussed my projects, especially my android app project. He even asked me to show my app. He wanted to verify if everything written on CV is not fake or exaggerated. I strongly advise to go through your whole CV and be clear about all possible questions which can be asked.
- Second interview was an HR round. In this interview, they asked me some conventional questions like why do you want to work with Walmart? Where do you see yourself after 5 years? Be prepared for these questions. HR round preparation is almost the same for all companies. Try to be very precise while answering, your way of answering the questions delivers the impression of your personality. You can also practice it with your friends doing mock interviews.
Internship Experience:
There is a large gap between the selection time and internship period and in between that gap you plan out things that you will do during your internship. But this time, corona infected all of our plans. Things became so uncertain that I started to doubt if we are going to have our internship this year or not. Thanks to Walmart, they had been very generous and informed us about all our queries through WhatsApp groups. They finally announced the virtual Internship during April only.
I was in the data science team. My project was on imputing missing values in an irregular time series using deep learning. Walmart arranged great on boarding sessions on zoom trying their best to give us the best possible experience. My mentor was also really nice and polite. He thoroughly explained to me about the project, what to do and what to achieve. We had meetings on zoom on alternate days, where we used to discuss the project’s progress. They have also arranged some talks with many experienced people in different fields. Finally I finished my project finding a modified algorithm for imputing missing values. At the end of internship, I had also presented the results to our whole data science team, and our manager also appreciated our work. We are planning to write a paper on it and it might get published if everything goes fine. I really got to learn so many things there. It was a really great experience for me working with Walmart. Eventually, I also got the PPO offer from Walmart.
Now, the plans which should have been done during this internship period only, are postponed to next summer. I hope everything gets back to normal soon.
Tech-Board Experience:
It was my second year of college and being a tech freak, I already joined both Robotics Club and Electronics Club and was actively participating in the activities of both of them. I used to love spending time in clubs, doing projects. During the third semester, I also got an opportunity to present one of my projects at the Inter IIT Tech Meet held at IIT Bombay. Later in the fourth semester, I also mentored some projects in both the clubs for Techevince. In the same semester, I also started working on a 4i project — ARLE. That semester became very hectic for me, but with time it became habitual to spend time at Clubs. Soon after Techevince got over, Interviews started for the next tenure positions of the Technical Board. I gave the interview for the Overall coordinator position, for which I was a bit nervous considering internships coming up next semester. But later on, I realised that It is a really nice opportunity to learn things about management. Eventually, I also got selected for the position. It feels really nice to be a part of committee of people where you can contribute to the decisions which can bring changes for the betterment of campus.
My tenure work started in the same semester. We finalized the budget we’re gonna use for next year. Later, we planned summer projects for the clubs. Coming to fifth semester, I was worried about internship work and also had to manage the orientations of 13 clubs lined up right next month. Thanks to Shrey bhaiya, The General Secretory of Technical Board, who supported me all the time, especially in situations like these. He relaxed me from responsibilities at that time to prepare for my internship. Fortunately, I secured an internship in the second week only. Nonetheless, we were able to manage the orientations of all clubs very smoothly and also received an overwhelming response from the freshers. In the same semester, Shrey bhaiya had placements coming up. So, I took up the responsibility to organise Kriti 2019. We were also working to get new equipment for the advancement of our Board. Eventually, we managed to get a Laser cutting machine and a PCB printer.
Soon after Kriti got over, we started planning for Inter IIT Tech Meet 2019 going to happen at IIT Roorkee. This time we were very organised and doing things differently learning from the mistakes of last year. We planned everything, staying at campus all December, our contingent worked hard preparing projects for the competition but surprisingly all the CAA protests and riots in Guwahati dampened our pace. For some time we thought our contingent wouldn’t make it to Roorkee.
But how could god let all our hard work go in vain. Things got normalized, we still had to cancel our train tickets but finally we all reached there by flight and we performed very well there. We secured 3 gold medals, 4 silver medals and overall 4th Rank. It was one of my best experiences of my tenure in spite of the fact that I lost my new Oneplus 7 while returning back from Roorkee.
After inter IIT, in the next semester we started preparing for the Techevince 2020. From every club, there were many projects this time. We had also planned a lot of things for that event. We didn’t even sleep the night before the event, doing all the preparation. Everything was going well as planned until we got a notice from the admin to stop our event due to Covid norms of social distancing. And just the day after that, we were all ordered to vacate the rooms to go back home. I had never thought that my tenure would end this way in my wildest dreams.
That’s pretty much about my journey with Tech-Board till now. This is a place where I got to learn so much from Technical knowledge to time management skills, and also to learn from some of the best people in the campus.
The main takeaways from my experience are :
The hands-on experience you can get at clubs really helps you learn many things. You might think that you can also learn those same things without joining any club but trust me it takes a lot more effort and you don’t just learn things here, you also get to bond with some really nice people and the last but not the least, you get projects on your CV to display which helps during internships and placements.
I wish you all the best for your all future endeavors and always remember that : “Don’t underestimate yourself and the power of time, patience and hard work. “
