TIAA GB Interview Experience for Internship + FTE

TIAA GBS visited our campus in semester 6th, to offer an internship opportunity and post-internship a PPO(Pre Placement Offer) based on performance. So, my placement journey went through 5 phases:

1. Aptitude and Coding Test
2. Technical Interview Level 1
3. Technical Interview Level 2
4. Internship
5. PPO Interview

1. Aptitude and Coding Test:

It was an online test. It consisted of basic questions from Quantitative mathematics, Logical Reasoning, English, and CS Fundamentals. The difficulty level of these questions was fairly easy. The test consisted of 60 questions for which 60 min were allotted.

The coding test was 30 min, in which 2 questions were asked. Both were GFG basic to easy level.

2. Technical Interview Level 1:

The interview starts with an introduction where I talk about my name, branch, subjects I enjoy, and projects I worked on. Then the interviewer starts grinding me on DBMS. He asked me about the difference between DML, and DDL, thedifference in truncating, dropping, and deleting commands, etc. Then the interviewer ask me about java, questions were about comparators and comparable, Collection framework, Strings, Wrapper classes, OOP, and Encapsulation. The discussion then turns towards DSA where the interviewer initially gave a pyramid pattern and askedme to write the program to print it using any programming language in notepad. After then He asked me about linked lists, how would you delete a first node, last node, and middle node, and about stacks and queues.

3. Technical Interview Level 2:

Again interview starts with an introduction, the discussion starts with questions on Python. Then the interviewer asked me to explain what projects I have worked on and explain the project you are most proud of. project discussion took around 15 min wherein I was asked questions such as what inspired me to make this project, what problem does it solve, how I implemented user authentication, what database I used, what is ORM(because I used Django), and how I tested the project. Do you any know testing tools? and then the interviewer asked if I have any questions for him and Interview was over. The result came1 a week after. And guess what… I was selected! I was offered an internship which was of 2 months

5) Internship(online):

All interns were arranged in the group of two students and each group was assigned a mentor/manager. After the first 1-2 days on completion of the onboarding process, the mentor shared with us a problem document. which mentioned details such as problem statements and requirements. We were assigned a PoC(Proof of Concept) project.

The task was to build a full-stack standalone application using Spring boot and Angular. I didn’t know anything about spring boot and I had a little idea about Angular, our mentor asked us to spend the first week learning and so we did. I got to learn a lot about Spring Boot, LDAP authentication, REST APIs, Angular, and typescript.

The next week we spent learning and developing the backend REST API. And in the next 1-2 weeks we did the front end, which surprisingly took more time than expected than developing the backend. After a week or so we had to present our project on a zoom call to around 13-15 managers! The presentation was only 30 minutes and everybody seemed impressed! It went well. After a few days, a final PPO interview was scheduled with a panel of 2 interviewers.

5. PPO Interview:

The interview starts with a discussion about what we did during the internship, and what project we made. The interviews started with java rapid fire he asked a bunch of questions about java, questions from collection framework, hashing, “when to use ArrayList and when to use a List?”, OOP’s concepts, “how to implement encapsulation?” etc.

The discussion then moves ahead, interviewers asked a bunch of questions from DBMS and git. Then they asked questions about Spring Boot, like what are annotations, differences in @RestController and @Controller, what is JPA, etc.

After asking technical questions which went for 30 to 35 minutes they asked some managerial questions such as How would prioritize issues if 3 issues popped up at the same time and of the same severity, what factors would you consider? Tell me about a situation where you couldn’t deliver a project on time. Where do you see yourselfin 5 years?Interviewers then asked if I had any questions for them, and the Interview is off.

Result: Yes, I got the PPO!