ICE Intern Talk — NVIDIA

M Anand is an ardent Electronics enthusiast from the Department of Instrumentation and Control Engineering batch of 2015–2019, who has innate passion for research in various domains such as Robotics, Deep Learning and Computer Vision. Assumed to be a serious looking individual, Anand is a very jovial person to gel with, who hangs out frequently with friends and is an Age Of Empires addict apart from his academic schedule!

Hi, can you please let us know of your process in which you were selected for the internship at NVIDIA, Bangalore?

It was a 2 step process with the first round being resume shortlist followed by an interview. The process of getting shortlisted by resume is solely dependent on the HR. But, the selection seemed to be based on projects done and CGPA. The interview had questions from aptitude, digital electronics and few puzzles.

What domain does your project belong to? Can you explain about it briefly?

Since the company’s main product was GPU, I had my project belonging to electronics domain. I was given a part of a live project. It was based on ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) design and automation.

How was the work culture? How different was it from your perception?

The work culture was amazing. Since, It was my first experience at a corporate.I had a completely different perception of corporate like strict working hours, presence in formal attire etc. To my surprise it was an exact contrary, it was a completely flexible work system where, could work whenever you want (even midnight stay is allowed), or how short you
want (You can even come to work at anytime and leave the office after working for 2 hours) or even work from home.

There were 2 foosball tables and a TT room , and also a rooftop football court nearby which were awesome!

How did you prepare yourself during your internship for the tasks that were given?

Every intern was allocated a mentor who is the point of contact and every intern works under a manager based on the team he is assigned to. Though they had sent me few online courses from Udemy for preparation, I didn’t prepare anything before the start of intern as such. My 1st week in internship was allocated for preparing myself, and in subsequent weeks I had a clean weekly schedule of what to be done every week.That helped me maintain
deadline and finish off work in time.

What’re the different set of domains that are available in NVidia for interns?

Though there are a lot of domains on which NVIDIA is working, there are usually only 3 teams where interns are put under. They are GPU, CPU and Mobile computing.

Did being a part of any club in college help you in attaining the internship?

Surely, yes. It played a huge role during my resume shortlist and gave me an edge over people from core electronics department. Being a part of Spider, I had done several projects on electronics and robotics domain, during the course of which I got introduced to a lot of new things. Also, around 50% of my questions in interview were based on my project done for Sangam, and I am pretty sure that was what impressed the interviewers the most.

Being a part of club, you learn to coordinate and work as a team which is much appreciated in corporate work life.

What was your previous work experience in projects, internships, and how much it helped you in this internship?

Since I was a part of Spider - Tronix, I happened to work on some project or the other always. We participate in robotics competitions, and tech fests of IITs for which we build working prototypes and test on new ideas. As I had stated before, these projects were the ones which differentiated me from the rest of the bunch and landed me my dream job. So, its very important that you have atleast 2 good projects done before you sit for placements.

What are the required topics to be learnt for attaining this internship?

Aptitude tests are must, solve puzzles when you are free, and being thorough with all concept taught in digital electronics would suffice with respect to NVIDIA. I didn’t do any additional courses or online courses.

Some important topics in Digital Electronics include Finite State Machines, K maps, Memory storage, etc.

On a general note, order to prepare for the electronics profile, I would suggest you to refer to Morris Mano for Digital Electronics, Sedra Smith for Analog Circuits and NPTEL lectures in Analog Signal Processing by Radhakrishna Rao which could be a great one to grasp the concepts thoroughly. You can utilize the questions from IndiaBix for brushing up the concepts.

Any piece of advice to juniors who would be sitting for company interns?

Interviewers always start from the most basic questions. So, be thorough and confident in answering them. If you answer the first few questions, you will eventually gain confidence, and also, not answering deep questions will not have much effect.

But failing to answer the simpler ones will definitely
create a bad impression of you on them.

Feel free to contact M. Anand for further queries!

WhatsApp: +91 94445 24150

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anand.krishnan.7311352

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anand-murali-1a532012a/

Interviewed by Venkatesh Bharadwaj. S.