In this article, Parag Agrawal, Dept. of EEE, presents a quick recap of his journey from the Internship Test to the Remote Internship at Goldman Sachs.
Learning never stops and you can never learn it all because life never stops teaching.
Test
Goldman Sachs opened for all branches with a CPI cut off of 6. Its test consisted of 2 coding questions (1 from DP and 1 from array), few MCQs from Quant and Probability, 2 subjective questions (related to value education e.g. Tell us an instance of your leadership)
I was able to complete 1 coding question and few test cases of 2nd. Quant and Probability questions were not very tough. And I wrote answers to both the subjective questions.
Tips:
1. Do not spend all your time on coding questions. MCQs had more or less same weightage.
2. Do not leave subjective questions blank. They won’t take more than 5 minutes.
Shortlist
I was in New SAC (Student’s Activity Center) building. It was 9:30 pm when we received the list of shortlisted students for Goldman Sachs. I was in that list along with 59 others. We had to report at 6:30 am, the next morning.
I started preparing for the interview along with my friend from EEE and my hostel, Reet. I called 3 of my seniors who had internship experience at GS. Went through several GS interview experiences from GFG. Looked at all my projects code, revised OOPS concepts, revised basic probability formulas, looked at my bookmarked questions on InterviewBit. I slept at 3:00 am.
Tips:
1. Sleeping late at night just before interview is not recommended.
2. Calling seniors with same company’s internship experience and online available experiences gave me an idea of what things to do in that short span of time.
3. Make sure you are ready for questions related to your projects.
Interview
It was 6:30 in the morning. 60 students, wearing formals and wishing each other all the best were sitting in core 4 ground floor classroom. A person was calling students one by one and taking them to their respective panel (there were 14 panels in total, with 1 interviewer in each panel). I was thinking of some good answers for typical HR questions, when I heard my name being called.
Round 1
It was a 45 minutes long interview. 50% of the time was spent on discussing about my projects mentioned in CV and my past internship experience. He seemed to be impressed by that work. Then he started asking coding problems. He started from the easiest and kept on raising the level. For every question, my first response was the most obvious one, with least time efficiency (brute force) followed by words like “But we can improve its time complexity” and then giving a more efficient algorithm. Questions were mostly from array, two pointers, linked list.
Last few minutes were spent on my PORs and achievements.
Round 2
This round went up to 1 hour. Again 20 minutes were spent on my resume, discussing projects and past experience. Then he started with probability and quant questions. He started with an easy one and kept on raising the level. Probability questions were a bit easy. Quant questions judged your skills with numbers.
Tips:
1. A significant time is given for resume and project discussion. So thoroughly go through your resume once before interview.
2. Think Aloud : Keep interacting with the interviewer about the approach you are thinking of. They will help you, its not a viva. So, relax.
Internship
1 week after the interviews, slot 1 results came. And hurray, I got selected for GS (the only company for which I was short listed in slot 1). In February ending, we received our offer letter. It was supposed to be a 10 weeks internship starting from mid May and location was to be Bangalore. But, due to covid-19 and lockdown, duration reduced to 6 weeks and location shifted to ‘home’ ☹ (but they paid stipend for whole 10 weeks :3).
This 6 weeks journey from attending a number of presentations in 1st week to giving presentations in last week was a great learning experience. I had daily meetings with my buddy (mentor) and daily team meetings. You get to work on live projects and company’s deliverables during the internship which feels so satisfying.
Tips:
1. Spend enough time on understanding the project, the exact deliverables and purpose.
2. Participate in team discussions. Be confident, to give your ideas regarding the project.
3. Understand your company, your division and your team.
4. You need not worry if you know nothing about finance. GS spends enough resources to teach finance to people from technical background.
Though work from home ruined my plans of trip to Goa and Pondicherry, plans for night outs at Bangalore, and reduced my networking opportunity to a great extent - it provided flexibility to work at any hour of the day, work with the comfort of home and saved accommodation money :3
