Goldman Sachs Interview Experience for Summer Internship 2021

On 24th Aug, it was announced by our college’s T&P division, that Goldman Sachs is going to conduct a test for Summer Analyst Role. On 6th Sept, I got selected for the role.

First, students were required to apply for the role of the college T&P portal. The CGPA requirement for applying to this role was 6.

The online round was conducted on 27th Aug. They used hackerrank as the platform. It consisted of 5 sections. To clear the online round we were needed to qualify 3 sections. But there was one more section that was CGPA. So, if you qualify 2 sections and have got a good CGPA you will also get selected for the interview round.

Now 5 sections in the online round were (135 mins):

Section 1:

 2 coding questions (30 mins):

• The first question was to find the sum of Manhattan distance between each pair of points given in the form of (x,y).
• The second question was to find the minimum Euclidean distance need to travel to reach from the initial point (x1,y1) to the final point (x2,y2). But there are some trees (line segments) lying on the path whose starting and ending points were given.

Section 2 (Aptitude):

• The questions of the aptitude section were tough. It reminded everyone of JEE. It mainly consisted of mathematical questions.

Section 3 (Technical):

• It consisted of Computer Science related questions, i.e. Operating System, Computer Networks, Output, etc.

Section 4:

1 Coding Question (45 mins)

• Question: There are X types of flowers in a N * M matrix. Each cell will consist of one type of flower. You need to find the max number of connected flowers you can collect under the condition that you can not collect more than two types of flowers.

Section 5 (Behavioural/HR essay question 15 mins):

There were 2 questions:

• What will you do if your teammate leaves you in the middle of the project due to some personal issues?
• Mention a situation where your passion and enthusiasm helped you in achieving the goal.

These were the online round questions. I had trouble with the compiler in the last question and data was missing from the first question.

27 students were selected for the interview round.

Interview Round 1: On 5th Sept, the interview round took place. The video call was on zoom, and they used the codepair as the platform for coding.

My first round was at 10:00 am. I checked the profile of my interviewer as her name was on the code pair. She was Vice President and BIT MESRA alumni. She started by asking for an introduction. I mentioned my club positions and work followed by ACM ICPC and Google Kickstart rank along with codeforces rating. I also mentioned my hackathon participation. She was quite impressed with my experience. She gave me two questions:-

• Find the number in the array that has frequency more than half the size of the array.

I explained three approaches with different time and space complexity. She tried to trick me by providing the wrong test case. I told that the test case does not satisfy the question.

• Compare whether two unix paths are equal or not. Ex :- a/b/../c & a/./c (both are equal)

Interview Round 2: After the first round, we were needed to wait in the zoom break room. The second round started at 2 pm. This time the interviewer did not ask for an intro. He asked about the first interview. After that, he asked to describe one of my projects followed by some questions on node.js and java and the difference between them. Next, he asked 2 coding questions.

• There are two cities opposite each other across a river. You can build a bridge between two buildings, one from each city, with the same value so that it does not intersect another bridge. You need to find the maximum number of bridges that can be constructed. Ex:- 1 2 3 4 and another side 3 4 2 1. So you can connect 3–3 and 4–4 without intersecting. So the answer is 2.

I first told the brute approach. For a better approach, I mapped the first city value with index and checked for the second city’s longest increasing subsequence. He did not ask to code the solution.

• Another question was to find a number in a Rotated sorted array.

I told the brute and then the binary search method. He asked to code it out and tested the code on some test cases.

Result: The result of the selection process was out on T&P’s website around 6 pm, and I was one among the 7 students, who were selected for the Summer Intern Role. ????