Profile: Analyst
The first round was an online test. We were tested on quantitative aptitude,verbal and non verbal reasoning, and proficiency in English.
Most questions of numerical aptitude were from class 10th maths syllabus,barring a couple of permutation and combination problems.
Reasoning problems were not too difficult ,either. If one had any experience of solving such questions,one would find most questions easy. I think it was the somewhat tougher problems that made the difference.
In the English section,we were asked questions like choose the best synonym(or antonym,in some questions),pick the error in the sentence,choose the correct meaning of the given idiom (or phrase),choose the word that is spelt correctly,and so on. There were five or six questions in which we were given the starting sentence and ending sentence of a paragraph,and four other sentences,and we were required to order the sentences to reconstruct the paragraph.
The second round was a JAM (short for “just a minute “ ) round,held on zoom. Each candidate was given a topic at random,and was supposed to express his thoughts upon the subject for a minute or two. During the PPT ,we were advised to have a balanced point of view on the topic,and I did just that.
The topic given to me was “ Role of VR in the workplace in modern times”. I took a moment to gather my thoughts and made sure I had one advantage and one disadvantage of VR.
They don’t expect you to be an expert on the topic,rather they want to see how well you can handle your nervousness under pressure. Of course,they also want to see how well you can communicate your thoughts and how coherent your presentation style is.
My advice for this round : If you can’t think of anything ,smile as you think ( don’t overdo this,though;once or twice is fine) . It shows your confidence. Also,if you don’t feel confident speaking in English,start working on it;it’s gonna affect your career for as long as you’ll work.
A good place to start is to learn some idioms and proverbs that you can use whenever relevant to garnish your expression and add some flavor to your presentation.
Finally ,I was shortlisted for the interview round,which took maybe half an hour or so,and was held on zoom. I was quite nervous because I hadn’t prepared myself for the basic interview questions (like, “tell me about yourself”,or “why should we hire you “ , or “what do you know about Deloitte “…you get the idea) .
Fortunately,my interviewer didn’t ask me any of these. The interview round was entirely resume based.
In effect ,that meant my interview revolved around my projects,a couple of which were in Machine Learning (one about “twitter sentiment analysis” using NLP and Mutinomial NB,in which I categorised tweets as “positive” or “negative” ,on the basis of the emotion reflected by it. I did it from coursera . The other was about breast cancer detection using logistic regression). The interviewer asked me to briefly explain about these projects,what I learnt from them,and if I had any trouble implementing them. He also asked me how effective the categorisation was in each project.
In hindsight , I recall having mentioned that “ I developed a thing for machine learning during lockdown”. I think that inadvertently made the impression that I am an avid learner . Anyway,that’s one more thing I recommend : learn to sell yourself in a subtle fashion .
Then the interviewer moved on to my last project : a music player that I had implemented using pygame and tkinter. He asked me the same questions about it (baic explanation,performance,problems during implementations,bugs,etc) . I had made this out of my own interest so my enthusiasm showed,naturally. I told him I had always wanted to work on GUI ,but implementing it using C or C++ wasn’t easy for me,but as I learnt ML,I began to appreciate python’s large number of libraries and wondered if I could build some software I could use myself .
I told him the first music player I built was barely 10 lines of code,and I had to type in the name of the mp3 file I wanted to play. Then I built an improved version using tkinter,added some colors,buttons,a file explorer and menus ,and voila! I had a music player I could call my own . Even though it’s no VLC media player,I take immense pride in using it.
I did admit there were a few bugs,like how it opens minimised in the taskbar the first time you run it,but it wasn’t such a big deal. I told him I could fix it in a week ,tops. (Word to the wise : If you make a project in a very niche,specialised field,it is very unlikely that the interviewer will be an absolute expert in it .)
About implementation problems, I told my interviwer that C coding had inculcated in me a rather lousy “indentation style” that wasn’t very pythonic,which made it somewhat cumbersome for me to code in python ,but I did develop some rules of thumb along the way that helped me in successfully completing the project . He seemed satisfied and asked me if I had any questions for him. I asked him what all roles he had played in the company since he joined it. He told me about his journey in the company,as I listened attentively. In the end ,I thanked him for the opportunity.
Three or four hours later,all successful candidates were called on zoom and given the spectacular news. They asked us again if we had any questions for them,but every one was so glad at being placed so early that none of us could come up with anything. They just congratulated us again and let us celebrate . Nice people.
Comments
Post a Comment