JP Morgan Chase and Co Interview Experience

Interview Experience : JP Morgan Chase & Co. 

CGPA cut-off : 7.00 
Post : Software Developer Intern. 
Branches allowed : CSE, ECE, EEE. 

JP Morgan Chase was one of the companies to visit our campus. Before they had come, they sent the pymetrics test link to our PR and everyone had to give that test. This test was really fun and I really enjoyed giving it. It was to basically the “Trait Report”, as it said. 

Online Round :

The online round was a coding round with no aptitude or technical questions. It had 2 questions, one of 40 marks and other of 60 marks.Total time was of 1 hour.The contest was hosted on hackerrank. 

First Question was an easy question. The question was to decide result of an election. The votes casted by n people was the input, which was a string array whose ith element was name of the person for whom the ith person casted the vote. The person with maximum number of votes was the winner and in case of a tie, the person with largest number of votes and alphabetically greatest should be the answer. 

Second question was relatively tough(as usual), It was based on Dynamic Programming. It was the very famous “Weighted Job Scheduling” problem. Link : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/weighted-job-scheduling/ 
The toughness of question lied in the fact that entire testcase is in string, so u had to first convert all the required things to integers and then solve it, which was pretty much difficult considering the time bound of 1 hour. 

Anyone who solved atleast one problem was shortlisted for next round. Around 56 students were shortlisted for next round. 

There were 2 technical rounds and last one was HR Round(as usual). 

Technical Round 1:

It was a relatively tougher round for me than other rounds, the reason being that the interviewer was a bit strict. First he asked to introduce myself. During this course of time, he went through my resume. I had written HTML and CSS in my resume. So he started asking questions based on CSS first. 

Q1) What is selector ? 

Q2) What are the various ways of using CSS in an HTML page ? 

Since I didn’t know Javascript, he was not very much impressed and said that HTML and CSS without Javascript is of no use. 

Q3) What are the new features in HTML5 ? 

He was also not impressed by the fact that I had no projects on my resume. He asked me the reason for it, to which I told that I did competitive programming in my summers and brushed up my DSA skills. So couldn’t do a project. And finally to cover this fact, I told him the current Operating Systems Project I was doing. He asked a few questions about the project like what was expos(the name of my os project) and what actually I was doing in that. I told him how much I knew about it. 

He asked me one-two questions on oops concepts. I could answer only one as I was not good at oops. 

After a bit of questions on relatively weak topics of mine, he came to Data Structures and Algorithms. It was only then when I relaxed for a while. 

He asked me, what all data structures I knew. Since I had implemented a lot of data structures in my DSA and program design lab, i told him all those data structures. 

He then asked me a question on doubly linked list. 

Ques : Find nth node from the end in a doubly linked list. Trick in the question was that length of linked list was not provided and only single traversal was allowed. 

Ans : since I knew this answer, I told him the answer quickly. 
(Link to answer : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/nth-node-from-the-end-of-a-linked-list/) 

Next he asked me some basic questions on stack, queues, some time complexity related problems. 

He then asked which all sorting algorithms I knew. I told all the sorting algorithms. After that, he asked me to tell the difference between Merge Sort and Quick Sort. I told him in a little more detail than he expected :P. 

Last Question was the easiest one. 
Ques : Tell if a string is palindrome or not. ( Cakewalk question, very easy). 

At the end, he asked me if I had any questions for him to which I asked : what are the topics an intern should try to learn if he/she joins JP Morgan Chase? 

And the first round ended. 16 students were shortlisted for next round. 

Technical Round 2:

It was a relatively easier round for me. 
This round was taken by a relatively senior member of the recruitment team. He was very generous and greeted me warmly. He went through my resume and asked me to introduce myself during that time. 

He asked me what all data structures I had implemented. I told him all the data structures I had implemented(Array, LinkedList, Stack, Queue, tree, graphs etc). He thought I was comfortable in all these data structures so he asked me all the algorithms I had implemented in graphs. I told all those, after which he asked Bellman Ford Algorithm. I explained him very clearly and he seemed to be impressed by it. Later, he asked me to code in any of my favourite language. I initially tried to code, but later told him that I was not comfortable in graphs. He said ok and asked me questions on tree. 

He asked me to explain AVL tree and insert elements from 1-10 in tree. I again explained him very clearly and later started coding it. One benefit which he gave was to assume certain built-in functions like Height of tree etc. After a while, he said “you are comfortable in tree”, no need to write code and I was relaxed a bit. 

After that he asked me 2 puzzles. 
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/puzzle-1-how-to-measure-45-minutes-using-two-identical-wires/ 
https://www.mathsisfun.com/puzzles/weighing-10-bags-solution.html 

I answered both of them, and the round was over. 
11 Students made it to HR round and I was one of them. 

HR Round :

HR round was very chill. He asked me to introduce myself and then asked me how was Kerala and NIT Calicut. After talking for a while, he again came to this question that why didn’t I do any project. I tried to explain him about the reason (the reason being competitive programming). Next he asked me how I did I overcome my communication barrier as I was from north. I answered him and after that he asked if I knew any malayali word. I told him that the only word I learnt was “Malayalam ariilla” which meant “I dont know Malayalam”:p. 
And after few more questions the round was over. 

At last, after 12 hours of long and highly tiring process, finally the result was announced and 7 students were selected. The moment I heard my name in that list, this huge sense of relaxation came and all the fatigue was vanished. I was super happy that finally I made it to JP Morgan Chase & Co and that I didn’t waste time in my college. 

Tips :

Prepare well for subjects like Data Structures and Algorithms and Computer Organization. Since they are the only core subjects for a second Year student, the questions for internship are bound to come from these two only. 

Practice, Practice and Practice more. 
Practice a lot of questions, basically do competitive programming on a regular basis. This will make the interview questions really easy for you. A lot of my friends got Internship entirely on the basis of competitive programming. 
For exclusively interview questions, practice on Leetcode and Interviewbit. 

Look into basic concepts of oops. 

Don’t write anything in your resume you are not confident about. Be thorough about your resume. Just because you want your resume to be “Bhara Bhara”, do not write anything which you have no knowledge about. You will eventually get caught and it won’t make a good impression of you. 

It’s ok to not know some of the questions they ask. What they see is your effort on the problems, so after trying for a while, if you don’t know, just tell them honestly that you dont know the answer. 

Atlast, try to do a project, be any project like course project, project from geeksforgeeks etc. 
Projects link : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/computer-science-projects/ 

I would like to thank geeksforgeeks for their super awesome platform and interview experiences they provide, it surely wouldn’t have been possible without it. 

I hope my experiences help you to be prepared for your internship opportunities. 

All the best!!!