Hello, Everyone! I hope you are doing well and preparing hard for the Fidelity internship, to help you all I am going to share my Interview Experience followed by some tips to bag this internship.
Company Name: Fidelity Investments.
Roles Offered: Full Stack Developer or Data Engineer.
Round 1: Technical Assessment Test
It was an online round conducted on Hire-pro, duration was of 2 hours. The test had 4 sections-
- It comprised of 10 questions on English(Vocab + fill in the blank with appropriate phrase + comprehension based) and 15 minutes were given for them. The level of the question set was Easy.
- It comprised of 20 questions on Technical aptitude 30 minutes were given for them. The questions were on C and C++(Output based on looping conditions, pointers, and theoretical questions from Data Structures(many from Trees)), oops, 4 questions from computer networks (though I didn’t know the answer of any of them) & 3 questions from DBMS.
There were 2 coding questions. Duration: 2 Hours.
- 1st question : Given an integer array of size N , needed to Print all odd numbers together(ascending order) after printing even numbers in non-decreasing order.
- 2nd question : Needed to return Kth nearest (absolute difference) prime number corresponding to a given number N.
- The Brute Force approach didn’t give me green ticks beyond 3 test cases so I had to apply the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm.https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/sieve-of-eratosthenes/amp/
The last section was on algorithms. Duration: 15 mins for 2 questions. Both were of only 1 Mark.
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-minimum-number-of-coins-that-make-a-change/amp/
- The second one was on Backtracking, in this section you just need to write the algorithm/approach/pseudo-code on how you can approach and solve the given problem. I solved the 1st one, tried the 2nd one but later I found that my algorithm misses out on edge cases
Tips:
My Tip to clear this round is simple: Trust your coding skills, try to solve atleast one out of two, and try to get partial points if not full from the second one. My technical MCQ didn’t go well still I cleared the first round easily.
Round 2: Technical Interview
After 2 days I had my technical interview, in total 36 students were shortlisted for this round:
- Questions on OOP: Why do we need OOP? Properties of OOP in depth with examples, Polymorphism types, Friend Function, Binding.
- Questions on DSA ,DBMS and Deep Learning :
- What is malloc? Any alternative of malloc in C++ (“new” keyword), what is new? What is using namespace std? What is dynamic memory allocation? what is heap and stack memory and where are they located?
- What are Greedy Algorithms? What is Dynamic Programming? What is a quick sort? What is Merge sort? Which is more efficient among both and in which case? DFS vs BFS, in which case do we use stack? What is level order traversal?
- The interviewer asked me to code the Fibonacci sequence problem, I started coding (using recursion) and explained to him my approach meanwhile he stopped me saying he is convinced and we should proceed ahead due to time constraints.
- Meanwhile, he went through my resume where I had mentioned my Deep Learning project, he asked me about the difference between machine learning and deep learning, what are activation functions, what is vanishing gradient problems, what is leaky-ReLU. Lastly, he asked: “Since you have done most of your projects on Deep Learning, what if we assign you work related to Full-Stack Development? “
- As I had a project which uses MySQL, he asked me to explain how and where did I use the DBMS concept while making my project.
- Asked me about Normalization, the difference between trigger and cursors, the difference between N-RDBMS and RDBMS, types of joins, what are primary key and composite key? what is indexing?
- The last question of this interview was a scenario-based question where he gave me a table and asked me to fetch a piece of specific information. Initially, I explained to him my approach ( hoping to get away with this like last time, but this time I wasn’t that lucky xD), I started writing the query and committed an error but the interviewer knew my approach was correct so he assisted me a little and lastly he was satisfied with my code. ( Basically, it used the Self-Join concept)
This was a thrilling experience, to be honest as it was my first technical interview for a company and I managed to answer most of the questions fluently ( maybe because these were sort of fundamental questions only ).
Tips :
- Back your skills and speak with confidence, prepare OOPS, DSA, and DBMS most asked interview questions and be clear with your fundamentals.
- Be ready to face some out of the box questions as one of my friends was asked about software testing, cloud computing and servers (none of them were listed in his CV ) , presence of mind plays a crucial role in tackling this situation because that’s the only option left when the interviewer is in no mood of selecting you ( bitter pill to swallow I know )
- In my case, the interview duration was a bit longer than usual (double as compared to many of my peers ), so as long as you keep on answering the questions the interviewer will try to grill you more and more so don’t lose out at any moment just focus on that very question with patience.
- Don’t give rubbish and out of the context answers to any questions, in short, don’t get carried away with the emotions and the pleasant flow of that interview maybe that’s a trap to catch you in.
After an hour I got an email that I have been shortlisted for the HR Round.
Round 3: HR Round
After 30 mins of that E-Mail, I had my HR Round. In total 18 students were shortlisted to sit in this final round.
Duration: 20 Mins.
- HR round tests how well you communicate your thoughts and present yourself.
- This round started with the usual tell me about yourself question. She then asked me about my previous work experience and my role in that team (even if you haven’t had any prior work experience it won’t make any much difference ) continuing to this she asked me about my low moments (if any) working for that organization and how did I manage to overcome that. She then asked me why do I want to join a FinTech company though I had worked in the field of AI and robotics till now. Will you be satisfied with any development roles which will not be of your choice?
- She then asked me about the hackathon experience which I had mentioned in my CV and asked me about my role in making that project. She asked me where did we lose out in the final round of that hackathon and the learning I got from that.
- Lastly, she wished me with a bright smile and asked me to give it another try for that hackathon.
After 4 Hours the result came out and I was among the 15 Fidelity selects
Tips :
- Be confident, keep a smile on your face, and don’t get stuck in framing complex attractive sentences throughout the interview. Be yourself and think a bit before you speak your heart out, always remember that you are sitting to get a job in this company not to discuss your future plans and ambitions.
Thanks for reading this, all the best champ!