The Microsoft Internship Interview

Hey all,

Well today had my interview for an internship at microsoft. Was REALLY REALLY looking forward to it. Had been a long wait(from 27th JAN, 08..You do the math)..

We were basically around 70 odd ppl. This was at the Mumbai centre, Terna Engineering College, Nerul(or Neral-whatever!!).. We were made to sit on benches sufficiently apart..bout 19 to 20 ppl in one class i think..Nways, then the microsofties come in(all this while we were dealing with the Merittrac ppl).. And they write a statement on the board.. WE had to write some algo for that.. thats it.. If u wanted, you could implement it in any language you wanted. But that was purely optional..soo.. What we were expected to do is, after you write the algo, we had to call one of the microsofties over and tell them why we had made our algo so..and yes, they did cross question us and stuff.. infact one o dem actually made me do an LR transform for an AVL tree..
:-)

Initially, they had told us that the programs are gonna be really really easy, that all of us have already done at some point o time in the curriculum.. but they just wanted to see what all we can think of and our thought process..

And yes, one programme was REALLY easy(not easy as such, but I'm sure that almost all of you must have done it at some point, if you've learnt any programming language formally), but the other one, I had never heard of, and never realised what exactly they wanted. And the explaination they provided was not totally correct, as i later realised.

Anyways, moral o d story is that I did not make the cut.. I think they cut down the 70 no to about 15(not sure bout dis tho).

For all the ppl out dere who are reading this for some pointers, what i would say it that, dont listen to what they say.. DO not get carried away. stay focussed and study Data structures and algorithms REALLY well..ALSO, DO not get stuck into the implementation part. the ALGO is supposed to take centre stage. That should carry you through.. And yes take it easy out there. The moment I walked out of the classroom, I had come up with a very very efficient algo for one o d probs, but then it was of no use.. so keep your cool..

So overall a sad day for me. :-(

but it was a learning experience all the same.and i'm sure i'll do better next time in 3rd yr. :-)

Hope to start posting more regularly here..

Adios,
Nikhil