IIT Hyderabad Admission Experience for MTech (RA)

Hi all.

This is my interview experience for admission to MTech (CSE) programme of IITH as Research Assistant (RA) during winter. MTech RA means along with your regular coursework, you will also contribute to Research. Hence, time duration is 3 years (instead of 2 years).

The form filling date was 3rd Nov 2021 to 15th Nov 2021 and shortlisting mail came on 29th Nov 2021, where a google form was provided for taking our confirmation to attend interviews. 

Cutoff: My GATE score was 640 and in BTech, I had 9.02 CGPA. But, by talking with other candidates, got to know cutoff was around 500 GATE score and 8.5 BTech CGPA.

Rounds: 2 interview rounds were there and both were conducted virtually on MS Teams.

ROUND 1: Round 1 was on 8th Dec 2021. Almost 40 candidates were called for Round 1.

Panel consisted of 5 members.

• Ques 1: Introduce yourself.
• Me: Answered.
• Ques 2: Tell in detail in which technology you are currently working and what is the work flow(as I was working in NIC at that time)?
• Me: Answered.

Then they asked me whether I am comfortable in Data Structures. I said, yes.

• Ques 3: Can you print the values in nodes of a Binary Search Tree in descending order just using one pass?
• Me: Answered (this is a very common question in IITH interview).
• Ques 4: What is the time complexity for searching in BST and Balanced BST? why?
• Me: Answered.
• Ques 5: Is it necessary that height of a BST will be O(log n) only? Show with an example.
• Me: Answered.

Then a professor asked me a question on Mathematics, based on Binomial Theorem, which was a bit unexpected.

• Ques 6: In  , what is the highest coefficient and that belongs to which term?
• Me: Got a bit nervous and gave wrong answer. Then the professor helped me with hints and also told me to calm down.

Then a mail came on 9th Dec 2021 saying that I have been shortlisted for Round 2.  Also, there was a google form where we had to specify our areas of interest prioritywise.

ROUND 2: Round 2 was on 10th Dec 2021. This was the final round. 17 candidates were selected for Round 2.

At the beginning, a short online meet happened where the Project Leads gave a brief about different projects and the curriculum of MTech (RA) of CSE department.

Then, after a short break, interviews started.

Again, 4-5 professors were there who had projects under them. At the beginning, they asked about my interests. I said my primary area of interest is ML but I am fine with Systems also, if I get proper guidance.

Only two professors asked me questions. One professor on ML and another on Systems.

Prof 1 (ML based):

• Ques 1: Do you have any project based on ML.
• Me: Explained my project, which was on Prediction of Loan Application Status (then some discussion happened on it).
• Ques 2: Explain KNN and how it works.
• Me: Answered.

Prof 2 (Systems based):

• Ques 1: Explain the difference between TCP and UDP.
• Me: Answered.
• Ques 2: Why is TCP more secure than UDP?
• Me: Answered.
• Ques 3: What is the inbuilt data structure of HashMap?
• Me: Answered.
• Ques 4: How Multithreading concept can be used for implementing semaphores? Will it give any added advantage?
• Me: Answered and did a little bit discussion on it.

FINAL RESULT: Final result came on 17th Dec 2021. 6 candidates were selected and 2 candidates were kept in waitlist. I got selected for a project based on High Performance Computing 🙂