PlaceKode with Ritika Agarwal placed at Morgan Stanley

The IT industry is ever-evolving. Every day, new technologies come into existence, washing out the old ones. The rapid evolving of this industry is marked and is changing the shape of business measures. In such a vast sector, alone academics can’t keep you up with industry standards. You have to learn from external resources to be in the race. You have to be consistent, you have to be hardworking to set yourself apart from the crowd. You have to be unique. On this edition of PlaceKode by Uthaan we have excerpts from the interview of Ritika Agarwal, who is placed at Morgan Stanley. So let’s get to know how she flew high with her efforts and stood as an inspiration for many.

Firstly, many congratulations on being placed at one among the foremost investment banking companies of all time, Morgan Stanley. How do you feel about being placed there?

Thanks for the congratulations. It has been a very awesome experience to be placed at one of the topmost global investment brands. When I interned here, the experience was quite excellent, and I’m pleased to be placed there.

We are going to build up a chain by attaching all the links we could, and this process kick starts with your job profile. So, could you tell us about your job profile?

I am a summer technology analyst. Presently, we are building a search program that filters financial analysts. The current system had methods that take a long time to process. The task was to make a search system in which the person could type in their query. The system should search for the query using natural language processing to get the results. This is basically what I am doing now.

We would like to know about the significant changes you have observed in work life, after placement, or as an intern, due to pandemic?

At first, I had been quite excited that I would get to join the Office of Morgan Stanley campus. But, everything became remote due to the pandemic. The administration made a Citrix workspace for us. We had a login so that we used to log into the host computer at Morgan Stanley’s offices and then work from there. We had regular meetings with the manager. We have personal mentors called our buddy with whom we had regular meetings. The administration used to take other HR meetings for us on group calls and a private platform, making work more straightforward. That is why, for interaction and the work part, we did not face any difficulties.

Can you please walk us through your interview process? We would like to hear in-depth about the rounds within the selection procedure and the questions you have encountered.

So, there were four rounds in total, including the coding round.

The first coding round had three questions, and we were given 2 hours on the platform. The questions were based on graphs. There were some aptitude questions, as well. The difficulty of the coding test was, I would say, medium to hard.

The next interview round was held over a phone call. The interviewer asked me a bit about the projects I had in my resume. I had to explain the project and the essential points, such as methodology, and then he asked me to put in questions. One among those was how you would fit over a 20 GB process on a 4G RAM? So it would have to be solved using virtual memory, an operating system concept. Then there was another graph-based question.

After that, in the second round, the interviewer asked me a bunch of questions about the operating system and DBMS. These two subjects are the basics that you should cover during your preparation. Then she asked me a bunch of coding questions based on sorting algorithms and other data structures and algorithms. There is also always a system design question based on object-oriented programming. For me, she asked how to design a library system. This was the second round.

Then in the third and final round, the interviewer was the same. He asked me the same question which he asked me in the first round; the graph question and the second question was based on a sliding window technique. So, these were the things.

Along with the questions and stuff, we would like to know how you could describe your mind amid the interview process, like how have you encountered your nervousness and anxiety, maintaining your Peace of Mind for the consecutive rounds?

I was usually nervous before the interview, but I would just go into a calm zone during the interview. I get relaxed during the interview. You must keep in mind that the interviewer just wants to see how much knowledge you have, and usually, if you are stuck, they will give you some hints to push you along. So, you should not get hyper. It would be great if, before the interviews, you practice giving a mock interview. That is an excellent method to assess yourself and practice the state of your mind.

Practice giving a mock interviews.

Continuing with this, How would you evaluate your confidence and preparation on the day of the interview? Did you make a checklist for your last-minute preparation?

To be precise, I didn’t do last-minute preparation. I had been continuously preparing since August itself. I had been practicing coding on the Geeksforgeeks platform. I looked at all the questions which make use of the basic concepts. The basic concepts should be concrete. And that’s what they focus on. The interviews’ questions are not very difficult, and they’re usually basic questions. They check the knowledge whether you know the basic concepts and stuff.

So then, what should we do if we are stuck on a question during the interview?

You can ask the interviewer, and he will give you hints. Like in my case, I could not determine what data structure or approach should I take for the graph question, which he asked. So I asked him if he could help me along. He said that that question was really tough, so it was okay to ask for help. That was a pretty good game that I was able to use. Don’t be afraid to ask for hints.

Coming to your internships, you have internship experience at Netaji Subash Institute of Technology. Can you please describe your experience there? Please also include the way they helped you to acquire the next internship.

So basically, that was a research internship I did there under a professor. I had to develop a method to stabilize the neural networks using extended Kalman filters. It was a good experience. I learned a lot, especially as my field of interest is machine learning and deep learning. I would say it helped me grab an internship at Morgan Stanley. Yes, having experience like this on your resume is very helpful as they can see that you are proactive and want to work.

So as you said, you have also interned at ‘Morgan Stanley’ as a Technology Summer Analyst. How was your experience there? What qualities did you grab, and how did they help in securing the placement?

The experience was extraordinary.

First of all, what we had was training. Morgan Stanley is very focused on interns to learn stuff. We used to have regular classes during the first month, where we were taught things like data structures, java, and different courses. Usually, your managers will be selecting the type, of course, you will be taking. If you want to enroll in another course, you can request them, and they will change the schedule for you. As Morgan Stanley is a financial investment bank, we had day-long courses on finance. They taught us about stocks, hiQs, and all types of financial terms. They also conducted an interactive game, which was an excellent way to interact with other interns.

We also had regular meetings with the manager, the HR, and the mentor called buddy. There was a parallel hierarchy where we could talk with anyone we want regardless of their position in the company. We were on a virtual platform, we had contacts of everyone working in the company, so it was straightforward. Lastly, after the project completion, they had a science exhibition where we had to present our project.

You have got a pre-placement offer from Morgan Stanley. How would you describe the day you got to know that? For the PPO, if you were told to accept it at that instant only or else you would lose it, what would you have done?

So, we had been waiting for a month for the placement offer, and I was very excited when I got the mail that I was selected. We were given 3 to 4 days to accept the offer letter. Of course, I accepted it.

Going forward, Considering that your interest lies within the neural network and machine learning domain, can you please share how you began with it and what did you aim for?

Firstly, I took Andrew NG’s course on Coursera, which is a great beginning point. There are a lot of blogs I usually refer to as machine learning Mastery. You have medium articles which you can search for, and also there is one blog named PaperSpace. They post remarkably great in-depth articles about different concepts like stochastic gradient descent and other machine learning algorithms, which is a great place to look behind all the concepts’ math.

You sure did put in a lot of effort towards your aim, ma’am.

We’ll like to know how the college environment was during the internship season? Was there a sense of competition among all? Or the people we’re helping each other?

Yeah, there is a bit of a sense of competition, but everyone is pretty much helpful. I had made a partnership with my friend. We used to study together from the morning itself. People usually do things united because everyone wants to achieve the same thing. It’s better if you do it with your friends. That way, you can learn more through discussions. Do things united.

Coming to the beginning of your journey. What was your college life like? How have you handled both academics and your extracurriculars?

In the beginning, I joined Uthaan Club. I was in the writing Department. I guess I handled it pretty well. We used to host different events, and then there were fests. I used to participate in them. I have also organized some events. As for the academics, I made time for that as well. I made it pretty balanced. Usually, the events are held on the weekends so that we can study on the weekdays. You have to make time for everything if you plan properly. You can make a timetable of when you want to study and when you will be taking part in the co-curricular activities.

We know that you like to volunteer, and you were involved in the TechTogether in New York and HackDuke as a student mentor. Please tell us about your experience and what stuff you gained during these events.

I was the student mentor at these events held by MLH. That’s a hackathon organization that holds many hackathons. They sponsor these events. These events are usually held in discord for students. I was a student mentor. We had a timetable of when we would mentor the students participating in the hackathon and help them with the problems they were facing, like doing their projects. As I have experience in machine learning, the students facing issues with their machine learning projects asked me through discord. We had a video chat wherein I looked at their code and helped them by providing them with links where they could find the related stuff and get an idea of where they were going wrong. I was explaining to them where were they going wrong by debugging their codes. So these events are held quite seamlessly, given that they are organized online. Everything was appropriately scheduled. Mentoring gave me an experience of how to coordinate with other people and help them.

You have come a long way. How would you look back at your younger self?

I think I haven’t made any mistakes as such. I don’t have any kind of regrets. I would say that one should be consistent and believe in themselves.

Were you inclined towards neural networks and machine learning from the very beginning?

In the beginning, I was kind of iffy. I have done a project in Android as well. I was kind of introduced to machine learning by my father. I have a keen interest in Math, and deep learning and machine learning look all about probability, statistics, and math when I looked at it. So that’s why I got inclined towards it. I have an interest in the research-based part of it. I like discovering new things and from things that have been made. I have also done a research project. In it as well. So, it’s a fascinating field for me.

That’s interesting. Could you tell us about the websites you used to get maximum leverage out of there?

First of all, I took all the Andrew NG’s Machine Learning courses on Coursera. I also used blogs. Usually, what I do is I search on the Internet, and then I see whichever article explains the most. I think that’s the best way. In machine learning, take a good look at probability and statistics. A lot of machine learning methods are primarily based on it. You need to add the feature engineering part because data cleaning is an essential part of machine learning algorithms.

Thanks for the resources, ma’am. Interested will try doing this. How should we get highlighted from a crowd, and what techniques should we follow to get successful?

First of all, I think you should be hardworking. You shouldn’t be willing to give up if you face a hurdle; that certainly highlights one from the crowd. One more suggestion is that people usually make a clone of a website already made. That’s not a very worthwhile project to pick up. You learn from it, but putting that in your resume is not very impactful. You should look at the projects useful in daily life or research-based projects if you are into deep learning or machine learning.

Be consistent. Be Hardworking. Be unique.

According to you, what role does a person’s Co-curricular experience play during interviews?

Co-Curricular experiences are essentially all about personality development. You learn how to interact with people, how to coordinate, and how to organize things. During an internship and the interviews, you have to interact with the people in a remarkably optimized way. So the co-curricular activities help a lot with these things. They give you a broader perspective of mind as you organize different things and face various difficulties that sharpen you.

Was your interview experience based on machine learning exclusive, or was it much more inclined towards coding?

Morgan Stanley is still making a breakthrough in its machine learning and AI Department. So they truly did not ask me about my machine learning experience. They were more focused on data structures.

What percentage of the coding part can we expect in the interview when one is involved in the machine learning domain?

That depends on what you are interviewing for. If you’re interviewing for a machine learning-based position, for example, more prominent companies are focused on the coding part. So if you are interviewing for a machine learning-based job in a more prominent company, you should focus on both aspects, machine learning and coding. In startups, if you are getting interviewed for a machine learning-based position, you will be asked many in-depth questions about machine learning.

So, even if we are interested in machine learning, we have to code a little bit?

Coding is a must, as I said. I’m certainly interested in machine learning, but the interviewers didn’t ask me anything about it. It was just an introduction I gave them about my project.

What advice would you like to give to the freshers like us for their academic and career journey?

I would like to say that you need to be hardworking and consistent. Always have an excellent grasp of the basic concepts of whatever you are doing. I have seen some people in the interviews giving the example of machine learning or deep learning, but then they don’t know basic stuff. During interviews and in your career, learning and understanding the basic concept is very important. It is the only way you can build up a strong foundation.

Basic concepts should be crystal clear.

There’s a last-minute question. This question revolves in everyone’s mind. So suppose me, I graduated with my bachelor’s degree and was offered an outstanding job for some 40 lakhs package. Should I go to the position immediately or opt for higher studies or I should do the job for a year and then opt for higher studies? Most are confused about this. What advice would you give?

So what I would say is that usually, you want to opt for higher studies if you’re going into research-based positions. If you don’t want to go into research-based positions, you can first earn money, do the job and then go for higher studies if you wish. Suppose someone truly wants to get into a research-based position. In that case, usually, companies look for PhD candidates, so I would say do research. Do your higher studies and then go in.

Interviewed by Laukik Atul Shah and Lingala Sreya

Coordinated by Shivam Yadav