Morgan Stanley Interview Experience for Internship | On Campus (Virtual) August 2020

There were 3 Rounds. The First Round was the Online Coding Challenge followed by 2 Online Virtual Interviews over Zoom Call where we had to present our screen. Had the option to either code on IDE or notepad.

Coding Challenge: It was conducted on 23 August 2020. There were 3 sections in this round and the total time was 1hr 25 mins. Each section had its own time limit. 

1. First Section: It had 10 Aptitude questions. They were not that tough. The time for this section was 20 mins. 
2. Second Section: It had 7 Debugging questions and again the time for this section was 20 mins. They were also quite easy. If you know the basics then you will be able to do good in this section. 
3. Third Section: It was the main Coding Section. The time for this section was 45 mins. There were 3 Complete Coding questions ranging from easy to medium difficulty. With complete I mean we had to take the input and manage the output as well.

   • Given a number. Need to find the smallest possible number of the same size using the different combinations of the digits. For example, given in 7506, the smallest possible number is 5067. Notice the position of zero. The zeros cannot be in the beginning.

     The basic idea of solving this question was to store the digits of the number in an array and then just sort that array.

     Tip: The question was easy, the important part was to see the Constraints. The negative numbers were also possible so we need to take care of those as well.

   • There was some long story which I don’t remember now. Basically the question was to find the longest palindromic sub-sequence.

     I solved it using the Dynamic Programming Tabulation Method.

   • It was a tree question. Again there was a long story. Basically the question was to find the maximum sum of nodes at a level.

     Simple BFS on the tree and after every level update the result.

The result of the Coding Round was declared after 10 days, unlike other companies that declare the result the very next day. Only 10 students have shortlisted 4 girls and 6 boys.

After that we had our First Interview:

Interview Round 1: The interview was based on OOPs, OS Concepts, and 2 Technical Coding Questions. The interviewer was nice, not that friendly though. He started by asking what my usual day at college is like. After that, he asked me what all subjects I have studied so far. I told him about the OOPs, DBMS, OS. 

1. He then asked me to explain the 4 pillars of the OOPs Concept using the reference of a laptop. 
2. The question was given a Linked List Containing Words, find the repeated words without using any extra space.
3. He asked questions related to Virtual Memory and Memory Management in OS. 
4. He asked another coding question. The question was similar to the word-break problem.

The overall coding round was good but I think I could have done better. I was feeling bad and thought would be rejected. I changed clothes and went to bed. At 6 PM I got a message that my Round 2 is scheduled at 6:15 PM. I was really happy and nervous at the same time as I didn’t have much time to prepare myself mentally for the second round.

Out of 10 students, 5 were shortlisted for the Second Round.

Interview Round 2:  My round 2 was a long interview, probably because it was the last interview for the day. It went for 2 hours. It was an HR plus Tech Interview. There were questions related to my project and resume too. So the interview started off with Classical Introduce Yourself question. The interviewer was nice and very friendly. He asked me to screen share my resume. He then started asking Why I want to join Morgan Stanley and What all I know about the company. After that, some typical HR questions like Ever worked in a team, projects done so far, and internships. I had mentioned a few projects in my resume so we had a very lengthy conversation on it discussing the problems it is solving and back end and front end users etc. After that, he asked me what all social media platforms I use and then gave me an OOPs design question to re-design Instagram. Again we had a good amount of discussion on it. Followed by this he gave me a technical question similar to the rotten oranges problem on GFG and after discussing the solution for the problem he asked me how much time I need to code it up. 

Tip: Ask for more time than you would usually take just to be on the safer side. I was able to code the problem on time and debug it for any errors. After that again he started with HR questions like What all companies you have applied for before and if, not Morgan Stanley then which company you would like to join. Once all of the questions were over he asked me if I had any questions for him so I asked him about the work-life balance on which he gave me 10 mins long but an insightful answer.

The interview was over by 8:30. The results were announced by 9:30. 2 students were selected overall and luckily I was one of them.

Final Tips: Never lose hope. Keep working hard and always explain and give reasons and proofs for what you are doing in tech questions and what you are saying in HR questions.

All the best to all those who are applying for internships this year.