Nomura Interview Experience

Placement Process:

For the placement process, a total of 3 rounds were conducted. 1 MCQ round and 2 walk-in interviews were organized.

Round 1: Online MCQ Test

Approximately 170 students from B.Tech and 55 students from MCA appeared for the test. The test was based on Verbal, Quantitative, and analytical reasoning. 60 questions (20 from each section ) were to be attempted in a time frame of 60 minutes. The marks of this round weren’t revealed. I think I got most of the Verbal and analytical problems correct and was left out with some 6-7 questions of the Quantitative section. The problems were similar to those which come in competitive exams like NTSE. I would suggest trying to complete the verbal section as fast as possible as quantitative questions take up more time than others. 27 students from B.Tech and 11 from MCA made it to the interviews and I was one of them.

Round 2: Interview-1

Following the pre-placement talk, the interviews for the shortlisted students were scheduled within the college campus. The VP of the company ( who also presented the pre-placement talk ) was my interviewer for the first round. After a formal exchange of greetings, the interviewer asked for my resume and asked me to introduce myself as he went through my resume. After I properly introduced myself, I was asked some questions about one of my projects like a rough data flow of my project, why did I choose the problem statement, etc. He then suggested an extension to my project and asked my views on how I would implement it. He then out of the blue asked me to write any piece of code of python on paper and asked me to explain it to him. I used one of the functions that was used in my project. After this, he asked me to write the logic of a calendar application without using existing libraries from where I could directly import the interface. To this, I answered by mapping the starting day( this can be calculated by odd days) to the number and using the % operator to achieve a cyclicity of 7 days while keeping in mind the edge cases like a leap year, 30\31 days of a month, etc. The interviewer seemed quite satisfied with my approach. He then asked me about a time when I had to balance multiple priorities at once to which I answered relevantly. At the end, he asked me 2 puzzles, one of them was an easy variation of Tower of Hanoi and a Water Jug problem. I was able to answer the first one quickly but the second one was a bit difficult for me as there were 3 jugs and no wastage of water was allowed. The problem was that we had 3 containers of capacity 10L, 6L, and 7L out of which 10L one was empty and the other was filled. Without wasting water or external supply we had to measure 9L. I started to solve it and while solving I was discussing my approach with the interviewer. He told me that I was on the right track but after a couple of minutes of solving the problem, I was stopped due to time constraints. He then asked me if I had questions for him and I asked him the questions that I had in my mind.

All in all this round was majorly focused on how I approach problems and my ideation. However, asking other students, their experiences were different, some were asked OOPS, SQL, and named algorithms too. So it totally depended upon the interviewer.

11 People from B.Tech and 3 or 4 MCA were selected for the next round. However, there was a review round also where 8 Btech and 5 MCA students were given another chance to again get interviewed and get selected for the next round. This took place maybe because the company was not sure whether to select these students for the next round. A total of 3 students made it to the next round from the review round.

Round 3: Interview-2

This interview had 2 panelists. After handing over my resume, I was asked to give my introduction. One of the interviewers was quite impressed with one of the projects saying that the problem statement was very unique. The interviewers carefully went through everything on the resume and asked every little detail of each project to which I answered best to my knowledge. The interview went pretty smoothly as I answered pretty much everything confidently. One of the panelists said that he did not want to ask any tech questions to me as most of my projects were front-end extensive and maybe the interviewers had a command over SQL, so I guess that’s the reason I wasn’t asked one. 11 students were finally selected for the program.

Useful Tips:

• Don’t be nervous. Keep a smile on your face, with the interviewer, and calmly take a seat.
• Don’t ignore your body posture, it may seem insignificant but it speaks a lot about the candidate’s confidence and attitude.
• Regarding preparation, practice SQL queries and study OOPS and basic named algos like MergeSort. A basic understanding of DSA is a must and if not anything at least does the basic and most asked patterns on each Data Structure like Sliding window, detecting cyclicity in graph/LinkedList etc. You might even refer to GFG puzzles as the interviewer might ask you some logical puzzles and many a time they are quite similar to those already on gfg.
• Keep sharing your approach with the interviewer instead of staying silent and trying to solve it. Let the interviewer know your approach.
• Be thorough with your resume, don’t add projects or skills you aren’t much familiar with. Keep the reasons for choosing the problem statement and the tech stack ready beforehand as there is a 99% chance that it will be asked. Also do mention your role in the project if it was a group project.
• Try to be in the driving seat of the interview. You can do this by introducing your other skills( which you are confident in or which you feel would leave an impression) which is correlated with the question asked. For example, in my 2nd interview while explaining my project I also slid in an incident where I had to complete the Front end and integration of a model within 2 days due to the unresponsiveness of a group member, for which I had to learn new tech stack and skills. Now I could not learn it from scratch to advanced so I referred some projects and shortlisted how much I had to learn, which I was successfully able to do. This displays my time and task management skills. This answer kept the interview engaging and also the interviewers intrigued.

ALL THE BEST