Anima Jain is currently in her second year of engineering at Delhi Technological University. The article features her interview internship experience & her journey of learning Data Structures with C++ course with Coding Ninjas.
Sharing the journey of pursuing this course with Coding Ninjas, she said,
“The teaching approach and concept explanation of the course is very different. When I used to solve questions, more often than not, my approach used to be different from the ideal one.
In which the Teaching Assistant’s used to explain the fault in my approach by giving hints, but always left it to me to complete the questions. They never just gave me the solution code to decrypt it, which really intrigued me and helped me utilize all the possible methods I knew to solve a problem.”
Jain gave us a quick insight into the Technical Interview rounds at Goldman Sachs who came to her college in August beginning.
“All the questions were the ones I had already seen and attempted before,” she mentions.
The interview included two technical rounds and one HR round. In the first technical round, there were two questions-, one on Arrays and the other one on Trees.
“First, I had to tell the approach. If the interviewer was satisfied with my approach, I was asked to code it,” she appraised.
The second technical round included a few standard coding questions and questions from the projects on which she has worked upon. One coding question was on String Compression. Given the input, say AAABBBBCC, Jain had to return A3B4C2. In another question, a waveform and an array were given, in which she had to find the maximum length of sub-array in the array that conformed to that waveform.
The final one was the HR round which boasted of a few tricky and a few technical questions. There was a question on Trees LCA (Least Common Ancestor), one of finding leaf nodes in a tree and one to check whether a Linked List was circular or not.
The first question asked on my internship was on ranking herself in the four people who were interviewing for the same position.
“I said I couldn’t rank myself since I didn’t know the other candidates, but if they are selected for the interview, I am sure they would be good. Neither can I say that they are better than me nor can I say that I am better than them,” she explains.
The other question was a hypothetical scenario in which a task is assigned to her with an unrealistic deadline and she has to complete it. Through this question, they primarily wanted to comprehend her management and leading initiatives along with her efficiency.
She has been shortlisted by Goldman Sachs with a 75K stipend internship and will be starting it soon. Apart from Goldman Sachs, Jain was also shortlisted for an internship interview at Google. Albeit she couldn’t get through, nor she was kept her hopes high. However, she was elated to be considered as a potential candidate to be shortlisted fir the interview experience, which was different from the one she had given so far.
Sharing her internship interview experience at Google, she mentioned that there were two interviews back to back. The first one boasted of a very simple warm-up question of Arrays, in which she had to find the duplicates in an unsorted array. Another question was on DP and Trees, around finding the number of employees reporting to a person. She was expected to be precise in her approach and about the time and space complexity of the solution.
During the second interview there was a question on graphs followed by a Q&A session for all the interviewees, to ask any questions about Google.
Apart from the interviews, she had joined D-CODER society at her our college, from where, she got leads for two internships in my first and second year. Her first stint waswith a startup called Groovenexus, in which she got a chance to work on technologies like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). She also designed a CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) Web page for posts management and used PHP as her admin Database.
The second project was a very interesting and it was called Dastaan- an initiative by Oxford University – a peace-building initiative. It was for people who had moved from their native lands after partition. She made a VR application through which those people could see their native places and helped them increase their client base. “We analysed their current website and project dynamics in depth and come up with relevant solutions like Search Engine Optimisation. In this project, I got to connect with students from Oxford University who also visited our college for this project,” she adds.
Jain has also participated in Microsoft Codess in during the second year of her college. It is a remote mentorship programme by Microsoft, for female candidates only. It included various tech assignment and webinars. Along with a group of students, she did a project in which she made an AI based Tic-Tac-Toe’ game for which their team secured the third position all over India.
As she shares her future plans, she adds, “I am more interested in the development compared to Competitive Programming. I like to explore and learn new technologies for which I am doing some courses on Blockchain technology and alongside working on small projects to implement it like smart contracts.In the longer run, I want to pursue MS in Computer Science either after college or after working in the industry for a few years.”
She also has a message for all the readers, reading her journey, “Fake it till you make it! There was a time when I wasn’t comfortable or good at coding. Now, I finally feel satisfied with my understanding of programming and also know that there is a lot more I have to learn and do which can only come through hard work and dedication.”
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By Vidhi Agarwal
