A Post CDC Interview
I received a phone call from Mr. SS, nearly two and a half months after my name was published as one of the selected interns at Adobe.
“Your CDC experience has not been well documented to date, right?” before I could answer, he continued, “we would like to have a virtual meeting with you and provide the interview to the students preparing for CDC internships” he concluded. A moment of joy! Oh yeah. “I’m in”, I said. We fixed the date to be the 26th of November 2020.
Mr. SS: Good evening! Glad to know that, you were available and were able to give some of your “so-called” busy time. Can I call you Mr. P? I mean your surname is Panigrahi, after all.
Mr. P: Sure, no problem! Glad to know that someone wants to document my CDC experience after such a long gap.
Mr. SS: Well, tbh, this would be a long interview. It might be funny, sarcastic, brutal, but happy, would leave you with a sense of satisfaction. So, are you in?
Mr. P: Heck, yeah!
Mr. SS: Let us start with some basic questions. How happy were you when you realized that you were selected on Day 2 …
Mr. P: I was kind of too happy! See, the online semester just ended. And in the beginning, the workload was comparatively less than that was towards the latter part of it (which was drastically high). So, if I would have to wait some more weeks, it would have been a really tough time.
Mr. SS: Mr. P, please wait for our question to be completed. So our question was “… selected on Day 2 rather than Day 1?”. (And he burst into hysterical laughter)
Mr. P: See, that was honestly brutal (visible sad face). I was shortlisted for GS on Day 1. The first round was early in the morning. I logged in with the provided Zoom credentials and Codepair links. I saw fellow candidates had adjusted themselves comfortably, with a blazer over their body (My blazer was rotting away in my room 😢). My turn came, and I was shifted to another room. There was a single person who took my interview. He asked me questions on Anagrams. ‘How to find anagrams in a list of given words?’ I started with a hashing approach and detailed its mathematical background description. He was not particularly satisfied and asked me for a different approach. I told him all the methods that I had in my mind, and after the interview, I saw, I had surprisingly covered all the methods given in GeeksforGeeks. LoL.
I advanced to the second round. Again one person was there to interview me. I found some network connectivity issue with me, hence was permitted to turn off the camera. I was asked three questions. One was extremely similar to a recent question I had solved on LeetCode. Related to Dynamic Programming. Other questions were on Greedy Algorithms and Binary Search Trees. I was confident that I would proceed to the next round and had a nice lunch. It was around 3 PM that I realized I was not selected for the next round. Sed. I used to discuss with Pratyush Muduli, a friend from IIT Guhawati after each interview round was completed. We would crack jokes on our situation, and that was hilarious!
Mr. SS: It was a boring, plain, and long answer. Too much detail, Mr. P. To lighten the discussion, would you like to share one of the jokes?
Mr. P: Nope! They would lose their essence here without context. And they involved time-traveling and Dark series. So, I would not repeat it here. People reading the interview, would not laugh, and rather complain it being a complete non-sensical addition.
Mr. SS: True words. I had this one particular question. I had heard that you are the guy who never was inclined towards CP. But you were shortlisted for the GS, Gartner, and Adobe. They all involved competitive programming questions. So what was your secret?
Mr. P: Yeah, I am not much of a CP guy. I really had never done much CP. I was always interested to try out Data Science and ML problems, heck I even designed a CGPA predictor, with surprisingly wonderful scores (must have overfitted to the fewer data, I guess)! But when CDC approached closer, and most of my peers started trying out a lot of CP problems and contests, I was a bit concerned with myself.
I hated, particularly the time constraint in CP, but hey, time is what in first place defines it.
I loved to code algorithms, but never in a constrained time situation. I jumped into InterviewBit. I started from basics, I did participate in Weekly and Bi-weekly LeetCode contests. By few, I literally mean few, like two or three. So only InterviewBit and LeetCode, that was my CP journey.
I mostly appeared only those selection tests which had some other topics along with CP, so that, I had a chance to get shortlisted. (Raising his voice with excitement) And that plan worked!
Mr. SS: I have heard your famous line, “Give me time, I will give you code”. I have seen you code, and I realized that you have a good coding practice, documenting and stuff… but that was never gonna help you in CP. But, glad to know that you cracked the required questions in CDC! Along with this CP stuff, I heard you did two internships during summers?
Mr. P: Yeah I had, I worked as a Deep Learning research intern on a couple of projects. One of the projects was “COVID-19 detection using Chest X-rays”. It involved designing classifier(s) for separating a given Chest X-Ray image into possible Normal, COVID-19, or Pneumonia patient.
Another recent project resulted in a paper titled “Emotion Recognition using EEG Signals” which has been accepted for publication in the CCIS Series of Springer and also in the 10th International Advance Computing Conference (IACC) 2020.
Mr. SS: Holy wow, that was too formal! Nonetheless, congratulations! Let us come to a funny question. I heard that you watched a lot of movies during lock-down. How much truth is in the statement?
Mr. P: Ah! My dear, you have heard perfectly. It all started with Stranger Things. I completed the three seasons, then jumped into a couple of rom-com movies, you know, like “Notting Hill”, “Definitely, Maybe” and “Four Weddings and A Funeral”, I instantly became a fan of Hugh Grant’s accent. I watched a lot of his movies. I watched Pirates of The Caribbean (POTC) entirely and some action-superhero movies — “Deadpool”, “Avengers” and so on. In the midst, I also published some classic short stories in my blog “Within My Mind?!”. And I terminated my so-called escape route from hectic life with “Supernatural”. I instantly become a fan of SPN! ❤️
Mr. SS: Man, SPN ended recently. I didn’t know what to say. I never realized you would be a SPN fan. I would miss Dean, Sam, Castiel …
Mr. P: Hell yeah, Crowley is my all-time favorite. His dialogue on torture is a classic 😆. And the entry of God/Chuck in Season 11.
Mr. SS: Bad Day at Black Rock episode was one of the most bone-tickling to me! And Changing Channels was hilarious. Holy wow! Back to our interview. (A serious smiling face)
Mr. P: It was glad to know that you are a SPN fan.
And this was exactly the state of my mind during summers, should I do that, or do this, my friends are doing that, fluctuting from one stuff to other 😅
Let’s catch up some time after the interview!
Mr. SS: Sure! Now I would like to ask the question which all the readers are waiting for — your CDC experience. You have already described the GS part. Do elaborate on others!
Mr. P: I have already mentioned the types of selection tests I was targeting. The only exceptions to that were Google and Sprinklr. Other than that I gave Microsoft (ML part), Adobe, GS, Gartner, and Sony Japan. For most of the tests, the patterns were described via emails or in the PPT. Along with questions related to Data Science & ML, there were Probability and Statistics, Logic & Puzzles, Linear Algebra, and Essays. I got shortlisted for GS on day 1 and Gartner on Day 2. It was sad that in the official shortlist I was not there in Microsoft and Adobe.
After getting rejected on Day 1, and my friends in WHLS (a clique whose Mr. P is part of) bagging Microsoft (Sagnik Roy) and DE Shaw (Shubham Mishra) offers, I was a little down. I said to myself “Ok, you wanted to try for FT, and thus do not feel down if you are unable to get an offer via CDC” (trying to convince myself that there is still hope). I saw the shortlist for Day 2, there was Adobe, my name was not there 😢. I was there in Gartner. But my first round was in the evening hours (I don’t know the reason to date). I had the feeling that my CDC journey ends that day. But what I didn’t know that it would end on a good note!
Mr. SS: I heard that WHLS friends pushed you when Adobe Extended shortlist came, right?
Mr. P: They pushed me means, they said “See, you can try for FT. But no one is cent percent sure about FTs in the current scenario. So it would be better not to waste an opportunity that you have with you”, in short, “grab every opportunity” 😅 . Yeah, I know, they are great reasonable folks! (Obviously, they are Gawds 🙏 🙇 ). What I do not understand is why Somnath Jena called me to say, that, I should definitely prepare myself and sit for the Adobe interview. I was definitely going to sit for the interview, but I had no faith in me that I would be able to pull off. The main cause that I felt not so motivated, was because of the confidence I had lost, after getting rejected. Though as per me, I had performed well on Day 1. I had revised earlier the relevant ML concepts, before the interview, I dug all the intricacies of the internship work I had done.
Let the interview begin. After a short introduction and related stuff, he (the interviewer) directly jumped into the internship works that I had mentioned. And that took 45 minutes! (Thank you Somnath xD) Wowza! He asked me all possible types of questions, every possible detail, and every idea that we thought of during the internship. It was actually fun describing what the internship was about, our methodologies, our results, and conclusions. At the end of the interview, I asked one question from my side, regarding the specific kind of research work his team was doing. The interview ended with him describing the research problem his team was working upon.
Overall, I felt a sense of satisfaction.
Mr. SS: Aww, that sounds great!
Mr. P: You can not use ‘Aww’ wherever you like 👀. There was Gartner’s interview after this. I was asked questions on Software Engineering principles, estimations (estimate the number of vehicles in Delhi within 2 minutes 😅 ). Further, he gave me two scenarios and asked me how could these problems be formulated as applications of Machine Learning, and how to proceed, if they are indeed ML problems. It was also great, but I hoped that I would be selected as an Adobe intern if I am selected on Day 2.
Lo and behold, the next day, I had WHLS folks posting on my FB walls.
It was really a moment to hit the life’s pause button and enjoy the moment ❤️
Mr. SS: Any funny incident during the interview?
Mr. P: Well, there was one. I wouldn’t elaborate, since already we have dragged a lot. I received five missed calls from Placecom member, Param Goswami, who was handling the Adobe shortlisted candidates. That’s a story to be told over coffee at CCD. 😅
Mr. SS: It was really a fantastic time with you Mr. P. Before leaving, it would be wonderful if you could conclude, something like TLDR?
Mr. P: Absolutely no problem. First of all, regarding CP, I was able to get through because I was not targetting the intense software profiles. I was focusing on enhancing my confidence, instead of practicing a lot of questions in CP. Further, one piece of advice would be to fix the profile and companies you want to intern at. Applying everything, and getting rejected is not a good path to follow. Lastly, you need not get it in one go. A number of friends were selected on Day 3, 4, and later also.
Other than that, there are FT opportunities, off-campus opporunities — just do not lose hope if you do not bag internship in the earlier days of CDC.
Mr. SS: And cut! I believe people would be excited to read this, and yeah, let us stop this and bargain over SPN
Mr. P: Count me in!!
