Samsung R&D Internship(Interview+Intern) and FTE experience and tips to excel intern at SRIB
Internship Interview experience
CGPA Cutoff:No Cutoff
Branches Eligible:CSE,ECE & EEE
Process of Selection:
There were 3 rounds in total
1)Online Test
2)Group Fly
3)Personal Interview
Description of each Round:
Online Test:
The test had three coding questions covering data structures and algorithms. The questions in my set were:
i)Reverse a linked list in two halves, that is, rearrange the elements such that first and second halves are reversed but not the complete linked list.
ii)Given a binary tree, print the deepest leftmost leaf nodes.
iii)Given a linked list and integers m,n, rotate ‘m’ elements in the list my ’n’ positions.
All questions were simple data structures problems but use of STLs was not allowed on CoCubes platform, so it added to the complexity a bit. I could complete 2 questions in the given time.Around 50 students were sortlisted for next round.
Group Fly:
We were divided in groups of 5 . We sat in the GD room. The interviewer gave all 5 of us one question and 30 mins to solve it. The question was to find the minimum cost to make a matrix “happy matrix”. A happy matrix is one in which all the elements of atleast one row or column are prime. The cost of making each element prime is the difference between the number and next prime number. For example, the cost of 2 is 0, cost of 4 is 1, cost of 8 is 3, and so on.
With the brute force solution(finding cost for each row and column and then finding minimum of them), I could solve it in 7–8 minutes. I then sat back and tried to optimize the solution wherever I could. The interviewer then called each one of us individually and discussed the solution. He asked me my approach and asked me to optimise it wherever I could. After that he asked me vaious questions related to object oriented programming in C++ , he asked me about some keywords like reinterpret_cast etc which I was not able to answer but for OOPS part I explained him well by several examples so I got selected in this round. 3 out of 5 went for the next round.
Personal interview:
The interview began with the interviewer asking me for an introduction.He then asked me about my projects( I had one mini projects , so I explained them ).He took a look at my resume and asked me questions regarding my courses,awards etc. He then dove into technical topics covering DS, he asked me question based on searching words in a large database so I told him about tries and explained my approach and interview ended there itself.
The interviewer was friendly and helped me get to my solutions whenever needed.The interview went on for about 25–30 minutes.
Finally, 12 people were selected for the internship.
Internship experience:
I did internship in networks R&D team at Samsung it was from 18th May,2020-13th July,2020. One manager was assigned to me he then assigned some mentors to whom I have to report directly , they gave me task to make a tool to parse the large call logs containing data about different call id and I have to analyse them and tool should plots several graphs based on that data parsed. So I made this application with the help of a simple library in python that is tkinter. Many challenges I solved using threading and improving preprocessing the data . And lastly presented the tool at the end to the whole team
Tips to excel your internship:
Congratulations ,that you have got the offer.
a) Always be accountable to your mentor what you are doing
b)Think about all the aspects before implementing any task assigned to you and consult the same from mentor
c)Don’t shy ,always ask them doubts and don’t work in independent manner because it is better to ask before what you are going to do rather than later you get to know what hard work you have done will not bring good feedback to you
d)Try to test your code before handling to the mentor.
FTE Experience:
Last time what happened that due to covid SRIB denied the PPO to NIT people but recently they contacted us to offer us PPO so I participated in hiring process.
Again it comprises of 3 rounds ,they are as follows
a) Coding test on cocubes (90 minutes)(Eliminating)
b) Technical Interview(1:10 minutes )(Eliminating)
c)HR round(20 minutes)(Non eliminating)
a)Coding test
There were total 2 questions -
- In a binary tree i have to calculate the product of leaf on the same level and have to return the sum of such products
- Sum of nodes values in the boundary traversal of the binary tree
Both questions I was able to implement and use of STL was also allowed(which is a common misconception).
After two days I got the mail that I got shortlisted for technical interviews .
b)Technical Interviews:
- He asked me to explain me internship project then final year project as well.
- Then he asked me to implement the mutual friend functionality in Facebook, in it two nodes will be given to me and I have to print the mutual friends between them, which I first told him about graphs but he denied for this solution and then I told him about taking intersection of the arrays of two users and he was satisfied.
Below is the sample test case that he gave me:
In above case A,B,C,D,E are direct friends to user 1 and A,B,C. are direct friends to the user 2 so the output should be B,C if we have to find mutual friends between user 1 and 2.
3.Then he asked me about the implementation of the determination of the connection whether he/she is at the 1st level,2nd level or 3rd level ,whih we see when we search for any person in the LinkedIn , so I told him I will implement it with the help of graphs and will perform Breadth First Search from given node and explained my approach then he asked whether we can implement it by DFS also , so I discussed with him about this , so he gave the case suppose each person has 3000 connections so for that case as per time and space complexity which is better , I told him DFS because queue will store 3000 nodes but recursion stack will not do it so it is more efficient in terms of space.
4. Then he asked me that there are 10k songs with me and I have to display to the user top 10 songs as per its current popularity index which is difference between number of likes and number of dislikes which I told him I will use map to store and will use heap to show the top 10 songs to the user.
At last I asked his experience at SRIB
Then I got the mail that my HR is scheduled for the next day
c)HR round
She was pretty friendly and asked me about intern experience , what I liked in Samsung , why I want to join Samsung , about my current offer , I told her all of this , and told her about my interests and I asked her experience at Samsung.
After 5 days I got the mail that I got the job offer at Samsung.
Suggestions:
Below are some of my post and articles which you can read about:
You should be very good with atleast the basics of Data Structures, OOP, DBMS etc. Also, pointer is not overrated. Most companies(including Samsung) shortlist students on the basis of CGPA along with performances in Online test and interviews, so do not ignore the importance of CGPA and please remember that good feedback also matters at last for your selection at SRIB.
Thank you for reading…
