Morgan Stanley Interview Experience

Morgan Stanley visited our campus for internship and full-time positions[6 months internship + Full Time]. I was offered 6-month internship.

Round 1: This round had three sections :

1. Aptitude
2. Debugging
3. Coding

Aptitude – This section had questions on Permutation Combination, Mental Ability, Compound Interest, etc. Total questions – 8, Time duration – 20 minutes.

Debugging – This round had 8 questions again. The time duration was 20 minutes. Wrong code snippets were given, and we had to find the mistake and correct it.

Coding Round – This round had 3 questions and the time duration was 1.5 hours. 

1. A variation of https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/program-find-slope-line/ 
2. A variation of https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/largest-subarray-with-equal-number-of-0s-and-1s/ 
3. A variation of https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/longest-common-subsequence-dp-4/

I solved 3 or 4 out of 10 aptitude questions, 7/8 debugging questions and all coding questions. Out of 190 students, they selected 24 for the next round.

Round 2: This round covered a lot of topics and lasted for 1 hour, 15 minutes. Tell me about your favourite project, what did you implement, and what are challenges you faced.

C++ basics and Object-Oriented Programming

• What are the different data types in C++?
• What are access modifiers?
• Explain object oriented programming. What is inheritance ? What are the types of inheritance?
• Explain and code multiple level inheritance. In multiple inheritance, does the order of defining base class matter.
• What is polymorphism?
• Give example of Operator Overloading
• What is the difference between a struct and a class?
• What is virtual function? Explain virtual tables and virtual pointers.
• What is the difference between malloc and calloc?
• What is dynamic memory allocation?

Operating Systems

• What is paging and page fault ? What is virtual memory ?
• What is multithreading ? What is the difference between process and thread ?
• What are the various scheduling algorithms ? Why are scheduling algorithms used ?
• What is deadlock ? What are mutex and semaphore ?

DBMS: The interviewer asked me if I know database management system. I told her that I have worked with databases but have not done a formal course as I am not from CS . She then told me it is fine and asked me about Web Services instead.

Web Services

• What is client server model ?
• What are the different types of http protocols?
• What is a REST API ? What are the different methods?

Algorithms

• Given a vector of strings, return the index of element that has maximum number of vowels. Asked me to code the brute force approach and discussed the optimized solution.

9/24 students were selected for the next round.

Round 3: This round was taken by a really experienced engineer and was a system design + HR round.

System Design

1. Design an online banking management system. Low Level System Design and Object Oriented Programming was expected. The interviewer also expected me to take care of concurrency issues.

HR Type Questions

1. Talk about your internships. Asked me in detail about a specific internship.
2. Talk about your favourite project.
3. Asked me to give an instance of when I had worked in a team and what responsibilities I had handled.

6 students were selected finally. 4 were offered internship + full-time and 2 were offered 6 month internship.

Preparation: Morgan Stanley Archives from GeeksforGeeks. (Very important. Got a good idea of what sort of questions will be asked. OOPs and C++ from https://www.studytonight.com/cpp/

Operating Systems from GeeksforGeeks and StudyTonight. I studied only the important topics that I observed were being asked frequently in Morgan Stanley. They are

• Process vs Thread
• Why is thread a lightweight process and process heavy
• Multitasking
• Multithreading.
• Simple C++ program to implement threads
• Deadlocks
• Mutex and Semaphore
• Virtual Memory
• Thrashing
• Page Replacement
• Scheduling Algorithms
• LRU Cache

System Design from Youtube and Grokking the Object-Oriented Design Interview.

Data Structures and Algorithms: Leetcode

Revised each and every line from your CV. Make sure to know everything in depth, whatever is on your CV is fair game.