Cisco Interview Experience For Data Analyst Summer Intern

I am a student at IIT Madras, pursuing an interdisciplinary dual degree in TechMBA (for more info check DoMS, IIT Madras site) with a B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering. I have interned at 3 companies as an ML and data analyst intern. Apart from this, I have also been in lead and managerial roles in institute teams. I applied for the Cisco Data Analyst summer internship through the DoMS placement cell of IIT Madras. There were 2 rounds: Resume Shortlisting and interviews (4 rounds).

19 students were selected to sit for interviews after resume shortlisting.

A day before the interview, we were asked to submit new resumes without our names, institutes, grades, and contact information. We were given candidate codes. This was done to avoid any unwanted biases.

Round 1 (Technical Round):

This was a 45 minutes minute round. The interview started with my introduction. There were a series of questions related to the points I said during my interview. There were questions related to Python and ML algorithms. I had worked on projects related to tensorflow.js, the interviewer asked in-depth questions about my projects. This interview mostly revolved around my ML projects. At last, there was a guesstimate to tell the approximate number of customers in a fast food chain in my area. The interviewer does not want to know about how much you know but more about how well you know what you claim to have worked on. So, it’s in your favor to be thorough with every word of your resume and have some analytical skills.

8 candidates were selected for the second round.

Round 2 (Behavioral Round):

This was a 30-minute round. This interview was more oriented towards data analysis. There were several questions related to my project on KPI dashboard and wireframes that I had developed during my past internship. He asked questions like how it helped the company, and several altered scenario to predict profit or loss of the company. There were statistics questions too. I don’t remember all but some were as follows: difference between R squared and adjusted R squared and it’s application, how to avoid overfitting, methods to handle missing values in data. There were more statistics questions after this. After this he asked me to tell methods to identify customers for 3 types of loan a bank offered. I remember answering all questions properly.

3 candidates were selected after this round

Round 3:

This was a 20 minute round. It had no specific name. This round focused on the application of AI and ML in real world and how my knowledge can help Cisco. He asked me how AI and ML will help cisco to which I answered : “We can detect defects in our modems, routers and switches using computer vision, predict future failure of the devices based on previous data, can implement in cybersecurity application to detect frauds and threats, use AR/VR to make webex like apps more interactive and interesting”. After this he asked about an interesting application of AI in real world, to which I told him about the paper on “Nasa Turbofan RUL” paper I had read a few days back. Then there were questions like why I wanted to join cisco etc. While talking I mentioned about my blogs on medium which interested him, he asked me to guide him through my blog on “Lebanon economic crisis”. I explained to him everything in detail after which he seemed quite impressed. This interview ended on a friendly note.

All 3 candidates went to HR round

Round 4 (HR Round):

This was a 10 minute round. This round had basic HR questions about strength and weaknesses etc.

Finally 2 candidates were selected. I received the offer which I accepted. The other offer went to a MBA grad.

I hope this article helped you!