Scholar@SAP Interview Experience 2023

SAP Labs was the first company to come to our college for on-campus hiring(B.E 2023 batch). To give a brief idea, Scholar@SAP is a work-integrated learning program in partnership with BITS Pilani. As a scholar, you will have the opportunity to work on 3 different projects varying across 3 different domains of your choice. Each project lined up for approximately 7 months. In general from Monday to Friday, you will be working on the projects and on Saturday you will be attending academic classes conducted by BITS Pilani faculty on the SAP campus itself. During the course of the scholar program you will be provided with a stipend and the fees for the M.Tech program along with some other benefits like food and transport are covered by the company. At the end of the program and successful completion of the course, you will have the opportunity to secure a position at SAP Labs. 

Round-1:

• Generally as in the case of my seniors, they had an online test that consisted of aptitude, logical, verbal, and technical questions. Out of the entire college, only 3-4 students qualified for the further rounds.
• To our surprise, they didn’t conduct any test for shortlisting the students in the first round. They simply sent a Google form that had questions like What’s your knowledge in Java, Python, C, C++, etc programming languages and also asked for our GitHub profile link and certificates if participated in any hackathons or coding competitions.
• They directly selected 5 students for the following technical and HR interviews and I was one among them. It was very strange since no one knew how they selected students based on the Google form(maybe they considered academic scores, not so sure). I must say I was one of the fortunate few who have been selected for the next rounds.

Suggestion: I recommend every student maintain a GitHub profile and upload all the work into it. Even though you don’t have any projects to upload, simply explore the GitHub platform, try creating repositories, upload the codes that you practice, upload your assignments, whatever it is simply upload it to GitHub and try to maintain consistency.

Round-2(Technical Round1):

• Basic technical questions were asked which included topics from OS, SE, CNS, and DB. All the questions were simple and easy to answer. For example, the interviewer asked me what is the difference between a project and a product. what is multiprocessing and multi-threading?
• The interviewer was friendly and asked a few general questions as well like where I live and what are my hobbies. 
• One logical question will be asked in all the interviews conducted by SAP Labs. The question that was asked to me was 3 switches 1 fan riddle.
• Overall it went well and I was pretty much confident in this round.

Round-3(Technical Round 2):

• In the subsequent round, which was also a technical round, I was interviewed by a different person who mainly focused on topics related to Data Structures and Algorithms.
• The experience and questioning style may vary depending on the interviewer. For most of the students, a similar structure was followed but it can vary. Some students were asked in-depth questions about their project works whereas in my case not a single question was asked about the same.
• I must say this round was a bit difficult to crack. I could only answer about 60%-70% of the question. The questions that were asked included problems with arrays, trees, graphs, and other data structures. 
• The interviewer asked me if I was familiar with Java and started asking questions related to OOPS like what is polymorphism and asked me to give a real-life example of how it works. Some questions asked by the interviewer are “What is a matrix and what is the use of inversion a matrix? How would you explain it to a school student who doesn’t know about matrix?”
• I took some time to think and was able to come up with a relevant answer in terms of Images and how I could relate images to the matrix and the interviewer was satisfied. A few more questions on DSA were asked.
• However, after this round, I was not so confident about my performance and eagerly waited for the results.

Suggestion: Whether you know or don’t know the answer, always be confident with what you know and answer properly. If you don’t know the answer convey that you are willing to learn it. Just don’t bluff the answers.

Round-4(HR):

• I was so happy to see that I was selected for the final HR round which was scheduled for the next day. This might be because of the learning attitude that I showed or my good performance in round 1.
• In this round I was asked questions about the company and usual HR questions, to give example “If your teammate is not performing well, how would you handle the situation?” 
• Finally, it went well and I was eagerly waiting for the results.

Last, on the same day got a mail saying that I was selected for the scholar program at SAP Labs. It was an incredible moment, and I couldn’t contain my happiness and excitement. It was almost like a dream come true. I am immensely grateful to all the individuals who supported me throughout this journey and played a significant role in helping me achieve this remarkable accomplishment.