Morgan Stanley recently visited my college offering a summer 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 on 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.
Round 1 Online round(100 mins):
Section 1: Aptitude Section which had 10 questions to be solved in 20 mins. The difficulty level of the questions was easy to moderate.
Section 2: 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 that can easily debug the questions.
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 medium to hard level. The time to solve 3 questions was 45 minutes.
- Question 1: MNC TechnoSoft needs to know the file upload status on the company’s server at the end of each day. The company has a list of file upload rates for N hours and it wants to identify the period within these N hours when the file upload rate was the highest. This period is defined as the shortest period of consecutive hours when the total file upload rate was higher or equal to the company’s predefined upload rate R. Write an algorithm to help the company find the period with the highest file upload rare within the N given hours.
- Question 2: In a coin picker game, N coins are arranged in a sequence. Each coin has some value points associated with it. The game is played by multiple players in teams of two. The team members must choose the same number of distinct consecutive coins and save the order in which the coins are picked. The team’s score is calculated by reversing the order of coins picked by the second member. The value points of coins picked by the first team member in a particular order are multiplied by the respective value points of the coins picked by the second member in reversed order. The product of each multiplication is then summed up to a score representing the final score of the team. Write an algorithm to find the maximum score that any team can score with their given coins. If the maximum score is negative, then output 0.
- Question 3: In an online game, N blocks are arranged in a hierarchical manner. Each block is given an ID from 1 to N. A block may be further connected to other blocks. All the blocks are connected by N-1 connections. Each block is assigned a specific point value. A player starts from a block (S). She must move forward from each block to a directly connected block until she reaches the final block, which has no further connection. When the player lands on a block, she collects the point value of that block. The player’s score is calculated as the product of block points that the player collects. The player who earns the maximum score wins the game. Write an algorithm to find the maximum score of the winner.
My aptitude went well, I solved around 2 or 3 debugging questions and 1 coding problem. Around 20 students were shortlisted for the interviews.
Round 2 F2F Technical Interview over Zoom(70 mins): The interviewer started off by introducing herself and asked me to talk about my projects. After listening to the details of my project, she asked me to explain how I would implement my project using OOPs concepts. We had a long discussion about this. It went on for about 25 to 30 minutes.
Then she asked me a few technical questions:
- Given a tree, print the alternate levels of the tree. I followed a simple recursive method to solve this problem. She then asked me to optimize the code which could be done by using BFS.
- Given a string which is a sentence, reverse all the Fibonacci indexed words.
- Given a 500GB file and a 10GB RAM, how would you sort the file, and what would be the time complexity of the solution?
I was asked to code the first 2 problems. She seemed pretty satisfied with all 3 of my solutions. After this, we had a short discussion on what programming language I prefer (which was Java) and we spoke about a few latest features added to Java 8. Then she asked whether I had any questions for her and I asked for how long she’s been working for Morgan Stanley and what she does.
The interview lasted for more than an hour and only 6 out of 20+ students were qualified for the next round.
Round 3 F2F HR Interview over Zoom(45 mins): This round was supposed to be an HR round but I was asked both HR and technical questions. The interviewer started off by introducing herself and asked me to introduce myself and talk about some of my projects. After listening to the details about my project, she asked me what were some challenges that I faced during the project and since my project was a team project, she also asked me how I managed my team members. These were pretty much the only HR questions I had. After this she moved on to ask some technical questions:
- Given a list of stock prices of 10 days, how will you maximize your profits? I was asked to code the solution, and she was satisfied with my solution.
- How would you design and implement a snake and ladder game using OOPs concepts? We had a discussion about this and it went on for about 15 minutes, and she was pretty happy with my approach.
Then she asked me whether I had any questions for her and I had some doubts regarding what her team did in Morgan Stanley (earlier when she introduced herself, she mentioned that she’s an executive director in Morgan Stanley and told me what her team works on) and I also asked her to give her feedback on my performance, and she said that she was happy with my solutions.
This interview lasted for about 45 minutes and only 4 out of 6 students were finally selected for the internship, and I was one of the 4.