UBS Interview Experience for SDE Summer Internship (On-Campus) 2023

On 1st November 2022, we received a mail asking interested students to register for the internship offered by UBS. Roughly 3000 students applied.

Online Assessment Round: From the applied 3000 students, around 1500 were selected for the OA round. Students were filtered based most likely on their CGPA and branch. The online assessment round was scheduled for 2nd November.

•  There were roughly around 20-25 MCQs based on CN, DBMS, OS, and DSA. The difficulty level was easy-moderate. The coding question was Leetcode easy type. 
• Two binary inputs were given and we were supposed to rearrange the bits of the second input such that the XOR of both inputs comes out to be the maximum.

Interview Round: The results of the OA were declared on 5th November, Among the 1500 students who had appeared for the OA, 40 students were shortlisted for the video interview. 

• The video interview with UBS executives was scheduled for 9th November. The video interview went pretty well. UBS people were extremely friendly and made every effort to make me feel welcome and comfortable. I initially faced network issues because of my extremely fast hostel wifi but they gave me enough time to rejoin the meeting. There were two people in the meeting Director and Associate Director. I was first asked to introduce myself. 
• After that, they immediately shifted to the projects mentioned in my resume. One of the projects I mentioned was a QR Based Medical Application built using Flutter(app), React(website), MongoDB, Nodejs, and Python. In the app, the QR Code was used to identify the doctors. One of the questions I was asked multiple times is why did I use Flutter instead of React for the mobile application, and what were the advantages of using Flutter/React instead of Java/Swift.
•  He then asked what could have been the replacement for QR Code for identification purposes – to which I replied Face Recognition, Fingerprint scanning, etc. The interviewer seemed to be satisfied with the answer.

 These were some other questions that were asked:

• Why did you use MongoDb and not SQL?
  • I am storing hierarchical data, so I have used MongoDb. 
• I see that you have C++ listed as your first skill. Are they sorted in any order or mentioned randomly?
  • I intentionally put C++ in the beginning because I was introduced to this language back in 8th grade. That is exactly when I fell in love with coding and was amazed to see how everything can be done with code. That is when I fell in love with Computer Science and now here I am, in my third year of study, studying Computer Science and Engineering.
  • We did have a fun little chit chat after my answer where one of the interviewers said how she got introduced to coding in her 3rd year of study and was amazed to hear that I started so early.
• What are some languages other than C++ that use the concept of OOPs?
  • Java, Python, Javascript
• What are the advantages of using python?
  • Easy syntax, good for beginners to learn, syntax closely match with natural language.
• How is garbage collection in python different from that of C++?
  • I knew the answer to this question but wasn’t able to recall it. I was stuck here and said them that I was unable to recall. The interviewers were nice enough, they constantly asked me to think for a minute or two, and in the end even gave me hints – pointers in C++, after that I was finally able to answer – Python does not have the concept of pointers, so garbage collection has to be automatic. Both of them sort of celebrated after I got it correct lol. Even I never imagined them to be this friendly.
• Explain the concept of Encapsulation 
  • Refer to GFG

In the end, they asked some HR questions like:

• What do you know about UBS as a company?
  • I was prepared for this part, thanks to the interview experiences posted on GFG. I mentioned all the points such as
  • The full form that was previously used
  • Location of UBS headquarters
  • Name of the current CEO
  • Foundation date
  • What does the company do?
  • I also mentioned the meaning of the three keys that are present in the company logo. They seemed to be pretty happy after hearing this.
•  Why do you want to intern at UBS?

They seemed to be satisfied with all my answers. And they’ll be asking you random questions like the last movie/tv series you watched(I’m not into movies and tv shows so I said it to them without any hesitation), what’s your favourite guitar chord (I had told them that I play guitar). The interview went pretty well and I was hoping to receive the offer letter from them.

The final selection names were mailed to us 22nd November. 16 people were selected and I was one of them.

My Preparation Strategy

• I had read all the UBS interview experiences that were posted in GFG. Most of them mentioned OOPs and Data Structures so I read all the related articles from GFG.
• Practiced OOPs questions (inheritance, operator overloading).
• DBMS Concepts from GFG and W3Schools.
• CN, OOPs from Striver’s Sheet.