Mastercard Interview Experience for SDE Summer Internship | On-Campus (Virtual) 2020

Mastercard came to our campus this mid-August (2020) virtually. There were a total of 2 Rounds, Coding Round followed by Technical + HR common Interview Round.

ROUND-1

Two coding questions (Time allotted: 1hr)

1. Basic String Problem (Easy Level) – Given a string with numbers, characters and symbols just need to check for given specifications, I don’t remember the exact question but it was Easy problems. (Tip: Remember to cover Edge cases)
2. Greedy Problem (Medium Level) (Tip: Go through standard greedy problems)

40/140 (CS, ECE, and Electrical students were eligible to give Online test) students were shortlisted for the later round. The interviews were to be held on the ZOOM platform.

ROUND-2

TECHNICAL + HR Interview (Around 1hr)

So Interview began with a greeting and ” Introduce Yourself “, asking about the Covid19 scenario, how are managing in this situation, what new stuff you learned during this pandemic, and other things…so to make you feel comfortable & relaxed 🙂 

And then switched to the Technical part, started with the language which I preferred was Java.

Questions:

1. He asked me about strings in Java (mutable or not string pool, methods, the difference between string/stringBuffer, etc)
2. Project discussion
   • Explain your projects, what concepts and technologies were used
   • OOPs questions- polymorphism, method overloading, final key, exceptions handling
   • DBMS questions- primary key, why this system required, easy/medium SQL queries
   • OS questions- deadlock(I explained the basic thing which I knew but also mentioned I don’t have much knowledge in this so he didn’t ask further questions on this topic)

3. DSA Questions:

   • Hashing based question: given to arrays A and B find if a particular element in A is also present in B or not.
   • DP: How many palindromes can be formed using a given string
   • Tree and linked list oral questions

4. Puzzle: How many times in a day the two hands of a clock coincide? (Answer: 22)

5. Questions on concurrency programming (multi-threading in java)

6. Which contest you participated in recently (as I have mentioned in Resume), did you face any difficulties during the contest how you overcame those.

7. One more DP question: Maximum path sum in a Matrix

8. As I mentioned some photography and contests too in my resume so questions were asked from those topics too

9. More HR questions: As my major is ECE so he also asked me how I was able to manage to learn to code with your EC curriculum (and to be honest I wasn’t), what are your long term goals, future plans- how will you do, what are you doing for it

And Interviewer ended the Interview with Thank you, it was nice to have a chat with you to take care, see ya!

A total of 14 students got selected for Mastercard Internship 2021.

Tips:

• Practice DSA well enough so  you get shortlisted (and Interviews are not a big deal)
• Do some projects for sure
• Be confident! don’t bluff simply say the truth if you don’t know the answer 🙂
• The interview will be bounded within your knowledge only so relax!

Woah well done! that’s all you got to do!  (All the best! just be confident, calm, prepare well and crack the nut!)