Microsoft Interview Experience for Associate Consultant Intern (On-Campus)

Microsoft India Global Delivery visited Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology for recruiting Associate Consultant Interns in August 2022.

Round 0: Shortlisting

Students were asked by College TPO to submit resumes and after that Resume/CGPA shortlisting was done. 25 students from CS/IT were selected by Microsoft for the next round out of which 20 were Girls and 5 were boys and I was one of them.

Note: Make sure you have a good well-structured resume with good projects. Make sure your resume is ATS friendly and is not more than 1 page. Officially 7 and above CGPA students were allowed to submit resumes but I noticed that all the shortlisted students had CGPAs above 8 so try to maintain CGPA above 8.

Round 1: Technical Interview

After a week, I received an email from Microsoft for the Technical Interview. The Interviewer was very friendly. First, he asked me to introduce myself and asked me which language I’m comfortable with coding. I gave my introduction and told him that I was comfortable with C++.

I was asked by the interviewer to share my screen since the interview was Online and coded on a notepad.

He started by asking basic fundamental questions about pointers. He asked 2 puzzle questions on the pointer and asked me the output of the same.

Then he started asking questions about Object-oriented Programming. Firstly he started off with theoretical questions like explaining the 4 pillars of Object-oriented programming with real-life examples and what are types of inheritance. basic questions like what is an object, etc.

Explain the Difference between run time and compile time polymorphism (dynamic and static binding). What does Destructor do? What are Superclass and Base class? He also gave me some code and asked me for the output. I was also asked to code a few OOP concepts.

After this, we moved on to the Data Structure and Algorithm Part. He asked me to write pseudo code for mergesort and explain it. Then he asked a few basic questions on Array. He also asked to write code for single and doubly LinkedList.

The DS, OOP, and CPP questions were easy. however, if you don’t know the fundamentals then it might get tricky to solve puzzles on concepts like pointers and OOP.

After this, he moved to DBMS questions like:

1. ACID properties
2. different language in DBMS like DDL, DML, etc
3. Relationships
4. difference between the DELETE and TRUNCATE
5. asked me to explain the types of keys and write some SQL queries based on that
6. then he asked me to write a query to print 2nd highest salary in an employee table
7. asked me about joins and to write queries based on that
8. upper and lower function
9. query using group for a given question

The Interview went pretty well, I was able to answer all questions except 2 and he gave positive feedback. After this round, I received an email that I have been selected for round 2.

Round 2: Technical + HR

The Interview asked me to Introduce myself. She asked questions about projects that I have mentioned in my resume. mostly questions were asked on JavaScript and DBMS. After this, she started questions about Cloud Computing since I had done a course on Cloud Computing and It was mentioned on my resume. She asked me a few questions about different Cloud Models like IaaS, PaaS, etc., and versions of cloud-like public, private, etc.

She then asked me about challenges that I have faced while building projects and some situation-based and behavioral questions.

After this round, 8 students were selected for the Associate Consultant Internship role however I was not selected. The important thing here is to note that don’t take HR round lightly. I was able to answer a technical question but I did some mistakes in the HR questions since this was the first interview I faced. Read HR questions and how to answer them smartly. If they ask you about Master, always say no even if you have plans to do it. I personally learned a lot from this experience. Later I got Internship at Dell, and there also they asked if I had any plans for a master and I said no. So be very attentive in HR and answer smartly. All the best 🙂