Target Corp. Interview Experience For Internship (On-Campus) 2023

Target came to our campus in Dec 2023, and only CS, IS, AIML and EC branches were allowed to participate. It was a pool drive and all rounds were virtual.

Round 1 – Online Assessment:

This round had MCQs covering reasoning, logical, Quantitative(Numerical) and technical questions. Alongside there were 2 coding questions (Try solving them yourself first)

1. In a school, there are activity groups. Each group has been identified by a digit from 0 to 9. The school principal wants to find out how many students are in a particular activity group so that the school management can provide a classroom for the activity according to the number of students. Write an algorithm for the school management to get the number of students who belong to a particular activity group.
   • Input: The first line of the input consists of an integer-particularGroup, representing the activity group whose total students the principal wants to know. The second line of input consists of an integer – studentGroup, representing the groups that are selected by the students.
   • Output: Print an integer representing the number of students who belong to a particular activity group.
   • Constraints: 0≤ particular group $9 0≤ student group ≤99999999
   • Note: Each digit of the student group represents the activity of a particular student.
   • Example input: 2 123228
     Output: 3
     Explanation: Activity 2 is selected by 3 students. Therefore, the final output is 3.
2. It was a graph-based question, Refer to the reference link. (I hardcoded two outputs to cover all test cases).

A lot of students had written the test, and 29 students got shortlisted.

Round 2 – Technical & HR: (75 min)

The HR called and interviews were scheduled at the convenience of the student. The interview happened over a Zoom call. The panel had two interviewers (one of them was a data engineer and was well-versed in Python).

The interview began with an introduction, which also included a brief about my past intern experience and projects I had on my CV.

The interviewer asked me my preferred programming language(Ans – python), and I was asked to rate my Python skills out of 10. Right off the bat, we dived into coding and technical things

• What are tuples in Python? How is it different from the list?
• I was asked to code alongside his instructions. Given a tuple ( 1, 2, [1,2,3], “ABC” ), I had to print any element in it which was a List or String. Upon giving a solution, I was asked to not use if statements in my code and also to print each element of List in a new line but the string to be printed in a single line.
  Note: this checks your in-depth understanding of the language. Look up where the branchless programming paradigm for this.
• Next given a list of integers, write a code to print the maximum valued integer and most repeated integer.
  Note: I was asked to give concise code so I used the understandingCounter from the the Collections module.

The interviewer moved ahead by testing the understanding of DS, OOPs, DBMS and Python.

• What are queues and stacks? Give practical applications?
• How to check if the stack or queue is empty?
• Overloading and overriding in OOPs.
• Elaborate on the Diamond problem (multiple inheritance) in Java.
• DML commands in SQL, transactions in SQL, and little on MySQL and PostgreSQL because I had used them in my projects.
• I was asked if Python supports multi-threading, which led to a brief discussion on python-GIL (global interpreter lock) and mutex-lock and semaphores.

HR questions:

There were mostly scenario-based questions,

• Imagine you worked on a solution for 1 week and your team members rejected your solution, how do you handle it? mostly teamwork-based scenarios.
• Little talk about family, and my hometown and I was asked if I had any questions. I asked about the department the interviewers worked in, the work culture and feedback on my interview. (Because of network issues I couldn’t communicate here)

The results were very late, about 12 days later after the New Year’s party I woke up in the afternoon and checked my phone I had been selected (along with 3 more people). 5-6 people had to go through one more round.

Note: Don’t take any questions lightly, take a while to think and answer, and keep the answers very articulate.

All the best!!