In this article, Yash Singhal describes his virtual internship experience at Oracle and obtaining a Pre-placement Offer.
Preparation:
I commenced my coding journey by learning Data Structures through a Playlist by Abdul Bari and several other Geeksforgeeks articles. After that, I took a course in Competitive Programming on Coding Ninjas along with a friend. Simultaneously, with the course learning, I practiced programming problems on Codeforces and LeetCode and frequently gave contests on both of the platforms.
Interview:
Oracle came in the Spot-1 round after the first week of the internship season. Their test included MCQ questions comprising several sections such as Programming, Database, and Vocabulary. Some crucial topics for the test are:
• Graphs
• Trees (AVL and Red-Black tree)
• Databases (SQL)
After being shortlisted, Oracle conducted two interview rounds: Technical and (Technical +HR).
Technical Round:
The technical interview began with discussions on my CV, mostly on the projects. My projects were mainly focused upon Web Development and coincidently, the interviewer was also from the front-end team. Thus, he diligently questioned the projects and the technologies involved in them. Further, he moved on to a discussion on OOPs (Polymorphism, Overriding, overloading etc.) and asked me to implement OOPs in one of my projects.
And finally, he asked two coding questions and a puzzle:
1. This question was related to strings and sliding windows where I was given a string s and integer k, and had to find the longest substring of s such that the frequency of each character in this substring is greater than k.
2. I don’t exactly remember the question but it was related to Priority Queues and the difficulty was of medium type.
3. The puzzle was asked from Interviewbit. I had solved this puzzle before too and thus was able to answer in one go!
Technical + HR Round:
This round also began with a discussion on projects and not specifically on technologies only but upon the validation of the projects such as where it is currently being used or what makes it unique from others. Then the interviewer asked a coding question. Again, I don’t remember the question exactly but it was an easy question related to strings. After this, he moved on to some HR questions like where do you see yourself in the next five years and what are your weaknesses.
I did well in both of the rounds and got a selection mail on the same day itself as it was a spot round.
Internship experience:
Week 1
Unfortunately, the internship went virtual because of the pandemic, so I didn’t get an opportunity to see their glorious office. The first day was devoted to system setup and the next couple of days were dedicated to boot-camp where all the pre-requisite technologies were taught by their instructors.
Week 2
This week kick-started with an introduction to the project from my mentors and manager. I was allocated the System Development Test team, and my project was based on analyzing the functioning of graph databases using PGQL (Property Graph Query Language) and comparing its efficiency while the database is in memory and when it is not in memory. Graph database was an unexplored topic for me so it took a whole week for getting accustomed to the new tech stacks.
Week 3–6
I had daily meetings with my mentor where she allotted me some tasks. The deadlines were not too stringent as they mainly focused on learning and optimal output and the working hours were also very flexible, although sometimes, we used to have late-night meetings with the development team because they worked during pacific time. These four weeks involved a lot of research on the graph database efficiency and testing it against the existing tech (won’t get into detail due to confidential reasons).
Week 7
So finally, we had to wrap up all the results and conclusions made through the research and testing and sum up the whole internship into a 30 min presentation. I did a mock with my mentors and their positive feedback helped me foster confidence before presenting to the panel comprising the whole System development test team and the heads in the USA.
Finally, after getting satisfactory remarks from the panel during the presentation, I felt a bit relieved and was confident enough to get a PPO based on my work during this tenure.
One week later, a congratulatory mail popped up in my inbox for the conversion into a full-time offer and yes, my hopes turned into reality!
So, this was the glimpse of my first cooperative experience wherein I built a good rapport and connections with my team and worked on an untraversed technology solving a real-life challenge !!
