Morgan Stanley Interview Experience for Spring Technology Analyst 2023 (Off-Campus)

Morgan Stanley is a global leader in financial services and institutional securities. It is one of the most prestigious firms to begin your career with. I worked with Morgan Stanley as Spring Technology Analyst from January to July 2023 and here’s how I bagged this internship opportunity.

How to Apply?

The application process was pretty straightforward. I did not have any referral so I applied directly through the company’s career portal. You can visit the company’s careers page for students and graduates, create an account on their portal if you don’t already have one, and upload your details and resume. The position opened up in the month of July that year.

Tip: Make sure you prepare a good resume and highlight your key achievements.

Online Test

After the resume screening, I received a mail in the last week of September, saying that I was shortlisted for the hiring process. I was invited for a pre-placement talk where they discussed our compensations, job description questions, the further steps for hiring, and any other questions that we had regarding the process. The pre-placement talk went on for about 50 to 60 minutes in the afternoon, which was followed by a computer-based online recruitment test (AMCAT) in the evening.

The test was conducted on SHL aspiring minds platform. There was a test window of 2 hours during which we had to complete the test. The test duration, however, was 80 minutes and comprised of the following three sections:

• Debugging – code snippets were given and the candidates had to identify the bugs in them, if any, and fix them. There were 7 questions in this section and there was a section timer of 10 minutes.
• Aptitude – this section had 10 simple multiple-choice questions that were to be solved in another 10 minutes. It included Logical Reasoning, Data Interpretation, and Numerical Ability questions. There was no negative marking but you could neither skip the questions nor change the answer to the previous questions.
• Programming – There were 3 medium-level questions that were to be solved in 60 minutes. It is alright even if you are not able to arrive at the most efficient solution. Just submit the brute approach and get partial points.

Note: Each section is timed so don’t spend too much time on a single question. It was more about time and stress management than technical skills.

Interview: Round 1

Within a week I got a call from HR saying that I qualified for the online test and my interview was scheduled on the next morning. It was a purely technical interview that continued for about 50 minutes. The interviewer asked me to introduce myself. We talked briefly about my projects. The interviewer then asked me to rate my knowledge on each of the computer science courses that I had taken thus far. Then I was asked to open an editor and proceed to the coding questions.

• Delete k nodes of minimum depth in a binary tree.
• Given a string of alphabets, print the longest substrings without repeating characters

It took me about 15 minutes per question. For the second question, though I explained my solution, the interviewer wasn’t exactly convinced so she gave me a test case and asked me to show the dry run. I was not very confident about this round but I got the call for the next interview in the same week.

Interview: Round 2

This was an HR + Technical round for me. It began with my introduction. The interviewer started with the generic HR question – Why do you want to join Morgan Stanley, What do you know about Morgan Stanley and its business, Do you know any leaders in the industry? There was a brief discussion about my school.

Then he moved on to the technical questions. He asked me what programming languages I am comfortable with and then asked me to explain the difference between Java and C++. There was a brief discussion on Java’s garbage collection. Then we moved to DSA. He asked me to write a function that returns all the palindromic sub-strings in a string. Then he asked me to modify the solution such that the answer does not contain single character sub-strings (i.e. sub-strings of length 1).

This round lasted for about 45 to 50 minutes and 5 weeks later I received the mail saying that I have been selected.

Hope this helps. All the best 🙂