Guide for Non-CS students to get placed in Software companies

This post is especially for people of non-CS branches who have developed interest towards coding and would like to work in a software company. The following post is made keeping in mind the placement process for IIT’s but it may be extended to NIT’s and other colleges

The whole placement process can be divided to three parts:
1. Resume preparation
2. Exam
3. Interview.

1. Resume Preparation
Having a good resume always helps and some companies shortlist people based on their resumes for the qualifying exam. A good CS related project in resume will increase your chances in interviews. If you are in your 2nd or 3rd year, try to find a good project in fields like machine learning, data mining or python related projects under guidance of a good professor. If you don’t have such resources you can always google and find projects on github and gfg and try to implement them yourselves. Here are a few examples :-
GeeksForGeeks projects
C++ game
By looking at your resume, the interviewer should feel that you have interest in programming and can work on your own on a software related project.

2. Qualifying Exam
This is the most important part of the placement process. You should clear these exams to get shortlisted for interviews. Being from a non-CS branch opportunities will be low so you should make the most of the opportunities. Most of these exams are conducted on Hackerrank and Hackerearth. These tests consists of MCQ’s and coding questions. Before going for the test go through the latest placement experiences on GeeksforGeeks to get an idea about the pattern of the test and sometimes the questions repeat.
MCQ’s –
Data Structures, Algorithms, Operating systems, DBMS and aptitude. MCQ’s from a important part of part of the exam with almost equal weightage as compared to code questions.
Operating Systems, DBMS and Practice Questions

Coding Questions –
Dynamic Programming
Bit Manipulation
Strings
Geometric Algorithms

Practice a lot. Try new problems.

3. Interview
Below are some of the important algorithms and data structures.
Array and Matrices
1D array
Array Rotations
Arrangement and rearrangement of elements of array
Properties of matrices
Strassen’s algorithm for matrix multiplication
Inverting matrices
Transpose of the matrix 

Linked list
Basic operations on linked list
Circular linked list
Doubly linked list 

Tree
Binary Tree
Binary Search tree
n-ary Tree
Heap

Graph
Basic graph concepts
BFS
DFS
Undirected graph, directed graph
Minimum Spanning tree
Shortest path algorithm
Topological sort
Connectivity in the graph
String processing and manipulation
Basic string operations
Pattern searching

Stack/Queue
Basic stack operations
Basic queue operations
Application of stack
Application of queue
Sorting and Searching
linear and binary search

Show your interest towards programming by mentioning your projects and performance in programming challenges. Keep your cool.

Thank you. Hope this helps you.