So many companies come to our campus yearly to lend Summer-Internship offers for the 3rd year students during the placement drives. Morgan Stanley visited our campus for Summer-internship (2 months) last summer.
More than 150 students applied for the company since they had CPI criteria of 7.5. So before the interview rounds, there was a coding+aptitude assessment test (Online).
- Online Assessment: The assessment lasted 1 hour and 20 minutes and was divided into three sections. It was held on the Aspiring Minds (SHL) platform, and although it was allowed to track back to skipped questions within a section, one wasn’t allowed to switch between sections. You could give this round remotely.
- Logical Reasoning(Aptitude): Questions that test one’s aptitude and reasoning ability (Quants). The questions were mostly of easy-medium difficulty and did not require a lot of calculations. To be more precise, it had questions on Permutation Combination, Mental Ability and etc. But I could not solve all the questions in the given amount of time.
- Debugging: This section had questions that aimed to amend the given code to meet the question’s requirements and clear all the test cases, mainly consisting of reverse sign, rectifying logic, and/or correct syntax. It was quite an easy round for me since I was able to solve most of the questions in this section.
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Coding round: It had three questions, mainly medium-hard difficulty. Questions were designed so that if a person recognizes the type/pattern of the question, he/she could solve it if he/she has good practice in implementation.
- You would be given chemical (inorganic) elements’ names in an unsorted array. And you need to return the string in a proper scientific format such that it is sorted. (E.g. [Cl,Mg,Cl] -> Cl2Mg)
- Variation of serialization and deserialize
- The question was on graphs involving the tricky greedy + DSU as the solution, but at that time, I was unable to understand it and could not solve it.
So In the online assessment round, I solved around 75% of Logical reasoning questions and 80-85% of debugging questions correctly. While in the coding round, I was able to solve 2/3 questions.
Out of all the students who applied for the company, 6 of us were selected for interview rounds. Interviews were just on the next day of the online assessment result. So we had very few hours to brush up on the skills and the projects included on the resume.
Interview Round 1(Techincal Round):
- It started with a basic 1-2 minute quick intro. I told about my skills and interests shortly.
- And then he asked me about my projects.
- He asked me about my DBMS project, which I had included. Then asked me to explain my project shortly.
- And then asked for a solution for a real-life problem based on my project. I told the solution, which can be done in 3 ways. We discussed it, and later on, he convinced me to say only the first way I told him was the correct solution others won’t work, and was someway depending on the first way. He was satisfied with the first way.
- So I suggest not rushing into solving the problem and letting the interviewer give feedback on your approach. And even if you are going for an alternate(or more than one) solution, wait for the interviewer’s response and feedback for the solution, then go for other solutions.
- After that basic DBMS questions and moved to OOPS. Here he first asked me to explain OOPS. I told him about the 4 main pillars of OOPS. Then he asked me to explain the concepts of OOPS by designing a real word object. So he had earbuds around his desk, so he told me to use earbuds as an object and explain OOPS.
- He asked me to present my screen and explain if possible. So I opened notepad and started to build a class and explained various attributes and methods I could have. Throughout this explanation, he helped me with how I should think about it and approach it. In the end, he was satisfied with my explanation.
- And moved to coding questions. Here he presented the screen and asked me a question. The first question he asked me was about a variety of job scheduling algorithms it was more real-life based. I told him the approach, and then he asked me about the time complexity this approach would require when implemented. I presented the pseudo-code for the same.
- He gave me some edge cases he could think of, and my proposed pseudo-code of the algorithm was working fine for all the test cases. He was satisfied with it.
- Then he asked me a second question. I gave him the brute force approach he agreed with it. And then, to get a more efficient algorithm, he asked me to use some specific data structure.
- Early, I could not think about the hints he gave me, but after some discussion, I solved the question using stack, and he was very satisfied with it.
- And then, after asking a few questions to him about his domain and profile, the interview ended. It lasted for around 1 hour and 20 minutes.
2 out of 6 were selected for the second round.
Interview Round 2(HR+Techincal Round): This round started with a quick Intro of mine. And then, to let me settle, Interviewer asked me about my campus and the weather there.
- And then, she started to ask me about the best thing about my resume. I told her about my DBMS semester-long project as the best thing on my resume.
- She asked more about the project, the teamwork, contributions, and more about the non-tech stuff of the project.
- Then she asked me if I had led a team/group other than course projects.
- And later on, she asked me various situational questions and HR questions.
- And at the end, she asked me one question based on stacks and basic math concepts.
- And then interview ended after I asked a few questions about the firm and the work culture at the firm. The interview lasted for 40-45 minutes.
One was selected, and I got a summer internship offer from Morgan Stanley.
Final tips and suggestions:
- Be honest with your resume. [Don’t Fake it!]
- Keep interacting with the interviewer while thinking or trying to understand the problem. [Think Loud!]
- Be calm and confident while answering the question.
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