American Express Interview Experience for Internship – EDA/CFR (On-Campus)

American Express came to our campus in September 2020 for hiring interns.

Round 1 (Online Test): Consisted of 60 MCQs related to Aptitude, Verbal, Code output and debugging, SQL queries, and finally 2 coding questions that ran very well using brute force. All test cases passed.

Out of around 280 students, 5 students cleared the round 1. I was one of them.

Round 2 (Interview): Honestly, the interview process was very casually taken forward, which is why I had all 3 rounds of my interview together in a total of around 45-50 minutes. The interview was taken on the CISCO Webex platform. There were 2 panelists – one tech and another HR.

First, they asked, “Tell me something about yourself?”. Then they started with the resume questioning. They asked thoroughly about my projects. I had done one related to NLP, so they asked me about machine learning and NLP and basic definition questions like confusion matrix, precision-recall, 3 types of machine learning, etc. 

Then they asked me one really simple programming question related to strings which goes like given a string like “This/t/t is a /t/t/t/t sentence/t/t/t” convert all the “/t” sequences to a single “/t”. I solved it obviously. But it was my first ever interview and I wasn’t aware that you are supposed to think out loud. So I just kept typing without speaking and the interviewers got bored. 

Then there was an SQL query. You had 2 tables and one simple query which could be done by joining the 2 tables. I did not think out loud in this one too so again they were not impressed I suppose.

Then they asked me a puzzle, which is cutting a cake 3 times to get 8 equal pieces, which I wasn’t aware of, so I couldn’t do it.

Lastly, they asked questions about the company like what do you know about AMEX, some questions about their charge card.

And that’s that.

The interview could be very easily cleared. But I wasn’t selected because of certain circumstances that made me super nervous and distracted before the interview. But with a clear mind, anyone could get selected. Just speak confidently and think out loud.