Wells Fargo visited our campus to recruit FTE and interns in the month of August. The entire process was conducted virtually and comprised 3-4 rounds. Out of the 270+ students who applied, around 140 were shortlisted and allowed to sit for the coding round. The shortlisting was done on the basis of CGPA and resume.
The coding round was hosted on the AMCAT platform and comprised 3 sections:
- English
- Business Analytics and Data interpretation
- Coding
- The English section comprised paragraph-type questions where you had to pick a phrase or word which was closest in meaning to the one given etc. This round was quite easy.
- The Business Analytics section consisted of questions based on bar graphs, percentages, stocks, shares, pie charts, Venn diagrams, etc. The questions were not particularly tricky but the speed with accuracy was the main challenge as the time allotted was quite less.
- The last section comprised 2 coding questions to be done in 1 hour. The first problem was similar to the LRU(Least recently used) cache problem. I solved it completely using a map and deque. The second question was based on backtracking( all possible partitions of string). Both the questions were disguised well in the form of long paragraphs. Everyone had a different set of questions, which minimized the chances of cheating, copying, or unfair practices. That being said, if you are a regular competitive programmer, the coding questions would be quite manageable. Try and give as many contests as possible on Codeforces, Codechef, etc.
After the coding round, around 29 people were shortlisted for the interviews and I was one of them. There were 3 interview rounds: two technical rounds and one HR round.
Technical Round 1: The interviewer started by asking me to introduce myself. He then asked me my favorite subject, to which I replied DSA. He asked me to give real-life applications of merge sort. He further asked me to compare merge sort with other sorting algorithms with respect to their time complexity, best, worst, and average cases. Once he was satisfied, he went on to OOPS and asked me a lot of questions on OOPS. Inheritance, Polymorphism, Dynamic binding, and almost everything related to OOPS was asked. Make sure to supplement all your explanations with sufficient real word examples. Lastly, he asked me an extremely easy programming question: Remove duplicates from an unsorted array. He asked me to first explain my approach and then code it in my editor and run it. Once it ran successfully, he asked me if I have any questions for him. I asked him about the technologies he has worked with at Wells Fargo, and after this, my first round was over.
Technical round 2: This round again started with the interviewer asking me to introduce myself. He then went on to ask me 2 questions :
- You have a large amount of data on people who want to open a bank account. This data includes name, address, phone number, JPEG/PNG photographs, pdf document files, and maybe even audio files. What is the most efficient way to store all of this data?
- You are on the 7th floor of a building and you want to reach the 3rd floor. On each floor, you have 4 elevators. What is an optimal way of deciding which elevator to choose so that you can go from the 7th floor to the 3rd floor in minimum time? We had a nice discussion on this problem for quite some time. I suggested 3-4 factors that one might take into consideration while designing an optimal strategy. He was satisfied with my approach to the problem and moved on to OOPS. Again, he asked me a lot of OOPS questions. I made sure to explain every concept with examples.
Then he went on to ask a few HR questions. Some of them were:
- Which technology do you think will revolutionize the banking sector in the near future? I talked about blockchain and AI. As a follow-up question, he asked me to explain in brief the concept behind blockchain and its significance to the banking industry.
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?
The last round was a telephone call with HR. This was just a formality and nothing was asked of me, except how my interview went.
The results were declared the same night and I was fortunate to be among the 6 people to get the final internship.
Points to keep in mind:
- Make sure you have at least 1 project in your resume that you can talk about confidently. I was not asked about my project but most of my friends were. Please do not copy projects from your seniors or friends 2 days before the interview and pass them as your own in your resume, as the interviewers will quickly be able to spot if you have actually worked on a project or not. Also, make sure to never include anything in your resume that you cannot answer questions on.
- Think out loud. The interviewer is more interested in the way you approach a problem than its correctness.
- Practice DSA from GFG, interview bit, and leetcode, and keep revising the topics you learn.
- Maintain a decent CGPA( preferably 8.75+) to clear the shortlisting round.
All the best!