Saarthi.ai Internship Interview Experience (On-Campus)

Saarthi.ai visited our campus, BITS Goa on 19 November 2021 for Summer Internship 2022.

Eligibility: All Computer Science students.
Criterion: No CGPA barrier. 

NOTE: Due to the ongoing pandemic, all the rounds were online.

Round 1(Assignment): The company has given an assignment depending on the role students applied for. I have applied for the role Python Developer. The assignment was given on 19/11/2021 and the deadline was 11:59 PM 21/11/2021.

Details about the assignment: The assignment had 8 questions in total. Questions 1, 2 and 3 were to classify and label the data given in a file “Utterances.txt” attached with the assignment. The task was to classify the utterances into intents, find meaningful entities and tag the utterances with the entities.

When I first saw the questions. I had two things going in my mind:

1. Give up and carry on with my academics.
2. Take it up as a challenge and do my best solving the question. (obviously went with this :D)

After I have done the classification and the data labeling, the harder part comes. In Question 4, I was asked to make a chatbot using a library called RASA in python. It took me one full day to explore and understand what RASA is, what it does and why is it used.

I have then trained the data using RASA and have created a model. I then tested this model by testing its ability to understand the statements I write into different intents that I have labeled in the previous questions and also by talking to it. I was extremely happy to see that I have built a chatbot on my own from scratch.

The questions 5, 6, 7, and 8 were simple problems which needed some basic knowledge on python in-built functions and data structures.  

Round 2(Technical Interview – 30/11/2021): The interviewer was extremely kind and polite. He was talking to me like a friend.

• Unlike usual interviews he did not ask me to introduce myself, he first introduced himself and asked me if I knew what the company does. I explained him as much I had in my knowledge. He then explained what the company does in a great detail.
• He then asked me to introduce myself. When I was talking about one of my hobbies being watching pro e-sports tournaments, he told me about his college life and his past days where he used to play DOTA and Counter Strike, both of us were getting to know each other and was a really amazing experience :D.
• After my introduction, he asked me to solve a problem, told me to share my screen and to open an IDE of my choice. The problem was to find out all the perfect numbers from 0 to 10,000. He also said that it was not to test your skills in data structures and algorithms, it was to test my problem solving skill, way of thinking and my ability to write a clean code. It was not so hard. If the sum of all proper factors of a number is equal to the number itself, then it is called a perfect number.
• Problem solving part: The problem was not very hard, to find out if a number ‘n’ is perfect, I traversed from 1 to √n found out if a number is a factor or not and added them all if the sum is equal to the number itself and printed it on the screen if it was a perfect number.
• Code writing part: I used python to write the code. Unlike writing it as a script (meaning without a main function) I declared a main function and 3 helper functions, one to factorize a number, one to find the sum of all factors and one to check if the number is perfect.  
• The interviewer was quite impressed for segregating different task into different functions and my way of thinking.
• The interviewer then asked me to solve the same question using multi-threading. I told him that I was still in the process of learning multi-threading in my Operating Systems Course. He was totally fine with it and told me to read about multi threading and mail him the answer for the question and also asked me to tell him the advantages of multithreading. With this the interview almost came to an end, I asked him if I did good. He said yes and I performed very well compared to others.
• I have read about multithreading and have written the code for the 2nd question and also have made a small analysis on the advantages of multithreading by plotting a graph of time taken for the normal approach and the multi-threaded approach for a range of numbers from  1 to 1,00,000. He was quite impressed with it.

Round 3(HR Interview – 3/12/2021): The interviewer was very kind and friendly. 

• She asked me to introduce myself. After I introduced myself she asked me if I know about what the company does, I swiftly answered everything I knew about the company. 
• She then asked me how do you think working at Saarthi.ai would be like, I said that a python developer has to be in touch with all the teams, like artificial intelligence team, CRM team, front end team and the back end team, so it would be an amazing opportunity to learn new stuff. She was quite impressed with my answer. 
• The interview was a short one and was straight to the point. 

Result: In the end, I got the offer as an intern in Saarthi.ai and my role being a Python Developer. I hope that this article was helpful. Please feel free to post your doubt in the comments, I will answer them gladly. 🙂

Important Topics and Subtopics to Remember:

1. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
2. Basic and intermediate knowledge of Python

Sources of Preparation:

1. I have also referred to www.interviewbit.com for the most asked interview questions and also to brush up my concepts in python.
2. For any other doubts, implementations and code examples, I have referred to www.geeksforgeeks.org, www.tutorialspoint.com, www.javatpoint.com, stackoverflow.com and many other websites.
3. I have asked my friends for their experiences and their insights on technical and HR interviews.

Any additional comments: It is usually the knowledge you gain from campus academics that is needed, but having knowledge from any other things like your hobbies, video games, literature, history, advanced machine learning, data science, artificial intelligence, web development, app development, game development, e-sports situation in India or anything is useful because the interviewer might be a person who is currently or previously who has followed these streams and that might give a good impression on you. These are some subtle things that could put you in a slight advantage over the other competitors.

Thank You!
All the best 😀