Bhabha Atomic Research Center(BARC) Interview experience for OCES/DGFS Scientist Officer

Hey everyone! Here, I am sharing my barc interview experience that took place on 16 June 2023 which one can refer for any PSUs or company interview. It was a matter of great pride to be within the premises of BARC, such a prestigious organization working to harness nuclear power. So, let’s understand the whole process now:-

1. Written Test

There will be a 120min online test consisting of 100 mcqs with +3 and -1 marking strategy. The syllabus is similar to GATE but you need to study one more extra subject which is software engineering. From here you can expect at least one theoretical question, especially from all the software development models. I personally referred to geeksforgeeks software engineering notes that you can find here-Software Engineering Tutorial – GeeksforGeeks

TIPS- Focus more on speed as you will get less than 1.5 mins to solve a question, so leave the questions that seem lengthy or tricky. Try to scan the whole paper and solve all the easy questions first. The questions are of easy to moderate level. If you are preparing for GATE then doing all the gate pyqs will make you prepared for this test.

2. Selection Procedure

They shortlist students both from written test scores as well as from gate scores. I was selected on the basis of my written test score and this happened on 24 Apr. Generally, they shortlist 200+ students for the interview. So, I have to choose the interview date between 16 May-16 June which will be held in BARC training school, Mumbai. Usually, you will get 1 month for the preparation for the interview where you have to focus on in-depth concepts where gfg articles helped me immensely which you can find here- GATE CS Topic wise preparation Notes | GeeksforGeeks

3.Interview(Highly deep and conceptual)

There were 6 panelists taking the interview.  They have provided some papers to write the codes and to explain the answers. Firstly, they asked me to write my favorite subjects to which I wrote: OS, C, DS, DBMS, and COA. Then, they said that they will start with C language and then they asked the following questions:- 
C

1.  What is a function, write a function explaining its parts.
2. Need of a function and can a function return more than 1 data !?
3. Write a function in c that takes an unsorted array as a parameter and returns the top 3 values of that array.

OS]

1. Functionalities of OS
2. . Difference between process and program
3.  How does a program converts into a process, explain in detail.

Ds

1. Write a program to create a stack that will store complex numbers in the form a+ib.

DBMS

1. What is normalization and its need!?
2. Define 1NF, 2NF, 3NF
3. Draw tables showing that the schema is in 2NF and 3NF

The interview took around 1hr and the level of cross-questioning was too much it made me realize that asking the why, what, and how of any concept deepens our understanding and can make these types of interviews more intriguing.