Hello everyone,
I would like to share my interview experience for admission to the Direct Ph.D. (Artificial Intelligence) program at IITH, winter admission 2021. A B.Tech graduate with a good academic background can apply for Direct Ph.D. without having to complete their post-graduate studies. The selection process includes initial profile-based screening, two interviews, and project preference selection. Due to the pandemic, the entire process was done online.
Initial profile-based screening:
The initial screening takes into consideration the candidate’s GPA, related projects, publications, etc. I got shortlisted in the initial screening and was selected for the first round of interviews.
First-round interview:
Professor A – Questions:
- Tell me about yourself.
- What is your favorite subject?
- What is the thread? Explain structural differences from the process.
- How is the thread/process executed? How can CPU execution time be managed? (Ans: Scheduling algorithms)
- Which scheduling algorithms do you know and how do they differ?
- How processes are loaded into memory and removed from memory after execution? Where is this component present and which memory does it occupy?
Professor B – Questions:
- Give an example of a min-heap. Explain how to convert it to max-heap. The time complexity of the process.
- Explain the recurrence relation of quicksort. The time complexity of quicksort.
At this point, the interview had already exceeded the allotted time, so they did not ask any more questions, and the interview was concluded.
After a few days, I received mail for being selected for a second-round interview. I was also asked to select the project I want to work on through a Google form.
Second round interview:
In this round, I had a panel comprising of 4-5 professors taking the interview. The question asked were mostly from the AI field for which I hadn’t prepared well and thus couldn’t answer them. So, I wasn’t selected for the program. Below are the topics on which questions were asked:
- Logistic Regression
- K Nearest Neighbours
- 3 C’s of AI
- Bayes’ Theorem
- Markov Chain
I hope my experience can provide some insights and guidance for future applicants.