This was an on-campus opportunity where Expedia visited our campus and I was applying for the Intern position. The overall hiring process consisted of 3 rounds.
Capfinnity Strength Assessment (45 min -60 min)
All the students who have applied on their job portal were invited for a strength assessment challenge and this round was used to check our mental strength and ability while being engaged in different scenarios. It was an eliminative round.
Online Coding Round (60 min)
Only shortlisted students from the previous round were invited for the technical coding challenge. (Eliminative round)
The test consisted of 6 MCQs and 2 Coding questions.
- MCQs were revolving around OS, OOPs, Data Structures, and algorithms.
- The coding questions were of medium(array, strings) to hard (dynamic programming) level.
Technical Interviews ( 60 min)
The students who cleared the cut-off of technical challenges were called for technical interviews. Two interviews were taken, they were non-eliminative in nature.
Technical Interview 1(Problem-Solving and Algorithm+ behavioral ): The interview started with a brief introduction about myself.
After that coding questions were asked, as these were physical interviews we were asked to write code using pen-paper and explain our solution through that.
I started with a brute force approach that was by considering all subarrays one by one and checking the sum of every subarray for implementing this I used the Run two loops approach. After that, I tried to optimize the Time complexity of the solution by using dynamic programming. The interviewer was satisfied with my answer and we moved on to a new question.
I started with a brute force approach of sorting the array and then finding the largest element as this is not an optimized solution so I used to map data structure to implement the solution, while explaining the solution certain questions to map data structure were also asked
(Tip: you should have thorough knowledge about the data structure you are using in your solution.)
I was able to provide the optimized solution for the question in the first go. Moving forward, some behavioral questions were also asked such as
- If you were given a project, and your deadline has already passed how will you deal with the situation and what should be a suitable explanation you would provide to your manager?
- What sort of difficulties did you face during your internship and how did you overcome them?
Lastly, the interviewer asked me if I had any questions for him. I asked about the work culture at Expedia and what kind of tech stack they use in a software team. (Tip: you should always have some questions beforehand that you could ask your interviewer, it provides a positive impression about your interest in their organization.)
Technical Interview 2(Data Structure+ behavioral ): The second interview also started with a brief introduction about myself and after that coding questions were asked.
I started with the brute force approach of creating a vector of (n+m) size where n and m were the respective lengths of the linked list and then store all the elements in that vector and then sorted that vector and made a new linked list that provided with the final answer but as this solution required extra space and time complexity is also high so, I tried to optimize it using the idea of temporary dummy node which would indicate to the start of the result list. and the pointer Tail will always point to the last node in the result list, so appending new nodes is easy.
I started off with the recursion solution of the given problem and then optimized it using the bottom-up approach of dynamic programming. The interviewer was satisfied with my solution and we moved forward to the next part of the interview.
This round also included behavioral questions such as,
- While working on a team project, leadership and teamwork are important skills. How do I rate myself in these skills and justify my response while providing an instance where I showcased these skills?
- What major challenges did I face while starting my coding journey and with what guidance and support I was able to overcome them?
In the end, the interviewer asked me if I had any questions for him. I asked about which team he worked on and what challenges he faced while working on that team. (Tip: you should always have some questions beforehand that you could ask your interviewer, it provides a positive impression about your interest in their organization.)
After a few hours, the results were announced and I was selected for the summer internship. The overall interview experience was quite good and they focused on problem-solving and data structures. GeeksforGeeks was a lot of help to me as it helped me in my internship preparation and provided almost all the content that was necessary for internship preparation.