College : KJ Somaiya College Of Engineering, Mumbai
Job Title : Associate Consultant
Job Location : Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore
Eligibility : 7 CGPA and above, no active backlog, all branches applicable
Oracle comes every year to pick out around 20 freshers for the position of an Associate Consultant. The interview process is divided in 2 days – 1 day for aptitude + coding MCQs and another day for interview rounds. We had a gap of 2 days in between these two.
Interview Process :
Step 1 : Aptitude + Coding MCQs
This test was taken on Oracle’s own platform (face-cam compulsory). It was divided among following sections :
- General Aptitude : Basic quants and logical questions like problem on trains, time and distance, solving mathematical equations etc.
- Coding MCQs : CS subjects like OOPS, DBMS, OS and Data Structures (binary trees important). There were also flowchart problems (given an algorithm choose what will come in a particular step of algorithm flowchart) and questions on Software Engineering.
- Verbal Aptitude: Basic grammar questions, sentence arrangement, passage based questions. There were also 2 subjective questions to be written in total of 10 minutes (1. What is your biggest achievement ? 2. Why do you wish to join Oracle ?)
Tip : This is a 2 hour long test which becomes tiring if you are not able to solve a few questions early on. But hang in there till the end as the difficulty level is basic. Time management is key.
Around 65 students were shortlisted after this step (out of 300+).
Step 2 : Personal Interview rounds
The interview was conducted on Zoom platform. There were a total of 3 rounds (2 technical and 1 HR)
Round 1 : First Technical Interview (45 min)
Questions :
- Tell me about yourself.
- Explain any internship that you have done.
- What are the different server technologies that you know ?
- JDK Architecture.
- What are the different types of data structures ?
- Difference between arrays and linked lists.
- Write code to insert element in sorted linked list (code to be written without any code editor).
- Java OOPS concepts.
Few other questions of similar difficulty were asked that I don’t remember.
Round 2 : Second Technical Interview (45 min)
Questions :
- Tell me about yourself.
- Explain any project that you have done.
- Make an ER diagram for the above explained project. (it was a firebase database, so after making some relations I told him about it and he went ahead with the next question)
- What is multithreading and how do you achieve multithreading in Java ?
- Can you have a try block without catch block ? Follow up question : When does finally block get executed ?
- Explain all the OOPS concepts in Java.
- What are collections in Java ?
- What is hashing ?
- What is primary and secondary index in DBMS ?
- Explain DDL and DML statements with examples.
- What is finalize() method in Java ?
- Write code for any sorting algorithm (I chose merge sort) (online code editor was provided, any language could be used (even python)).
After this he asked me if I was okay with going on-site for a few times in a year if needed for some project. He asked me if I had any questions for him. I asked him what exactly is the job description and what is expected from us in the first few months of joining.
Round 3 : HR Round (15 min)
Note : The HR said this was not a part of the interview (but it actually was). Two candidates had to give this round simultaneously.
Questions :
- How was the interview experience ?
- Why do you want to join Oracle ?
- Are you comfortable with any job location ? (they only take candidates who are flexible to work at any location)
- Why choose a consultant job and not a development job ?
- What skills do you have to take this job ? (we both said some management and team work skills but he expected some technical skills from us)
The interviewers were very experienced, but chill. At the end of the day 18 students were selected and 3 others were wait listed (would be considered later).
Note : Wear formals, interviews will be in English only, do revise Java concepts, OOPS, DBMS and OS one day before the interview, go through your projects, dynamic programming was not asked.
Tips :
- Be confident. Since the interview process was online, I was not at all nervous. Trust me it would have been very different for me if it was conducted offline. Be relaxed and have some sleep the day before.
- I answered almost all the questions correctly, but don’t worry if you couldn’t answer a few. I couldn’t find any examples of DDL and DML statements and I said honestly that I was embarrassed that I could not answer such a simple question.
- Do explain the codes as you write them as it helped me when my code gave a runtime error. In my code for merge sort I forgot to call the merge function, I did point it out later but interviewer went ahead anyways as I had explained to him step by step what was happening as I wrote the lines of code.
I was selected.
All the best.