Morgan Stanley recently came to my college offering an internship. The criteria for the registration were CGPA 7.5 and above and the Job Profile was Analyst.
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, and we had to code in either notepad or any text editor.
After the Registration, the company shortlisted 150 students and an online examination was held on the aspireminds platform. The test had 3 sections and each section had individual time allotted for them.
Coding round(1 hr 45 min):
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Section 1: Aptitude Section which had 10 questions to be solved in 20 mins. The difficulty level of the questions was easy to moderate.
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Section 2: 7 Debugging questions and time to solve was 20 mins. One can choose any programming language for debugging and the section was quite easy and one has a basic understanding of programming can easily debug the questions.
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Section 3: This was the coding question having 3 Programming questions and one was required to write the whole code including the main function for the problems. The difficulty level of the program was easy to medium level. The time to solve 3 questions was 45 minutes.
- Given an array find the smallest subarray which has the sum greater than or equal to x.
- This question was something related to arrays but I didn’t have time to solve this. I went for the 3rd one instead.
- The question was based on the BFS traversal of the tree and the concept was to get the maximum product of nodes in a path from a given source node to any of the leaf nodes and print the result.
My aptitude went well, I solved some 5 debugging questions and 2 coding problems. Students who did well in aptitude, solved some 5 debugging question and 1 coding problem were shortlisted. 16 students were shortlisted for the interviews.
Technical Interview (70 min): The interviewer was friendly, and he asked me to introduce myself. When I said I was from ISE(Information Science and Engineering) he asked how was it different from CSE(Computer Science and Engineering). He asked me what are all the subjects that I know and which language do I prefer. I said C++, so all the questions were related to C++. He focused mainly on OOPs and OS concepts.
From the OOPs part, he asked me about function overriding in C++. The most obvious questions were related to a virtual pointer, VPOINTER, and VTABLE. Then he asked me how do I write an interface in C++. Then some questions related to pure virtual functions, and he asked me about the pillars of OOPs and some questions related to inheritance and some questions related to constructors and virtual constructors.
From OS the questions were related to thrashing, process, and threads. He asked me about the communication between threads and processes. Then some questions were related to memory allocation and paging.
From DS and Algo he asked me about malloc and its alternative in C++, then he asked me optimal search and sort methods and then some questions about hash map and hash table. He asked me to explain how the hash map works. Then how the hash map is implemented in STL. Then he asked to write code for evaluation of expression according to BODMAS rule.
HR Interview (25 – 30 min): The interviewer was cool and he asked me to introduce myself. He asked me about my school and college. Then he asked me some technical questions too which were related to algorithms and memory management and the question was posed like a real-world problem. Then he asked me about teamwork and for that, I explained my design thinking lab project in detail. He seemed happy with my work and asked me how will I optimize my project if some error occurs. We discussed and shared our ideas w.r.t that, and he was happy. Finally, he asked me did I have any questions for him and I asked him in which field will I work if I get selected for the internship. He answered that question in detail and finally, the round was over.
The next day the results were announced and luckily I was one among the 4 people who got selected.
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. Leetcode and codeforces platform for coding are great. Try to solve all the questions from https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/must-do-coding-questions-for-companies-like-amazon-microsoft-adobe/amp/ and focus on OOPs and OS concepts too. Go through the archives and the interview experiences in GeeksforGeeks.
All the best to all those who are applying for internships this year.