IIT Interview Experience – Part IV (IITKGP & IITD)

Followed from IITK Experience.

If you wanna have a fresh start, you can jump to the FIRST post of this weblog!

Anyway, after IIT Kanpur, it was time for IIT Kharagpur and I must say, IIT Kharagpur is the most helpful institute if you face problem regarding schedules. In the application form, they had a range of 8 days, among which you can choose your preferable date for interview. And if you ever get “date-collision” with interview-dates at some other IITs or your semester exam or anything like that, they will change the date for you, even more than once, if you request them.

IIT Kharagpur has the largest campus among all the IITs and it’s full of greeneries. They took interview in two sessions and each session began with verifying original documents. Procedure was parallel and hence, efficient. 😉 And, while waiting for my turn in the interview, they served biscuits and cold drinks and told us that everything would be cool, “no need to take tension”! Wao!! Interview panel for me was very small – only two professors were there. They asked for my introduction and then my favorite subjects. I told them DS and Algorithm. They asked for more. I said “Autoamata Theory”. They asked for more again. I said “Discrete Mathematics”. They looked at me in a way that they never heard of these subjects before! And finally after a moment of silence, they started asking me question from Network Security and I/O & signal. Questions were like difference between SNAT & DNAT, Proxy Firewall configuration etc. And I tried to answer them, but it didn’t go well. And I seriously regret for not preparing any of the subjects from Systems for interview. By default, I thought, one would be asked question from DS/Algorithm. KGP was the exception! After all, wind of change is blowing over the sky of West Bengal!

I have some objections regarding IIT Delhi Interview call and final selection. But not now, may be some other day! Campus was not that big. I reached there at around 11 in the night coz my flight got cancelled and the security personnel arranged my stay in care taker cum security guard’s room! What a fascinating experience it was! A room without any lockable door with a couple of cots.  Light isn’t working, you have to use your cell; but God is gracious – the fan above the cot at least rotates, whatever be the speed is! But still the night went sleepless coz the mosquitoes over there had a feast!

Anyway, next day, interview began sharply at 10 am and it consisted of 5 panels. Less the number of panel, merrier you will be, trust me! My panel consisted of two professors and interview last for around 20 minutes. They asked me my favorite subjects after a couple of HR questions. Questions were –

1. Define B tree and B+ tree. What’s the necessity? How does the search happen? Write the pseudo code and the recurrence relation.
2. Design an algorithm for a problem that one of them framed. It was related to graph theory. And then they asked me to find the computational complexity of the algorithm that I suggested.
3. Question regarding Pumping Lemma for regular languages.

One thing for sure that, if you were not asked any algorithm question anywhere else, you would be asked at IIT Delhi for sure!

 

IIT Interview Experience – Part III (IIT Kanpur)

Followed Up from Exp@IITM

IIT Kanpur Selection procedure was on 7-8 May. I liked the IITK Campus very much. It is beautiful, full of peacocks. The two days I were@IITK, I used to wake up early in the morning to see a peacock fanning its tail while I brush my teeth. 😛 Accommodation provided by IITK was best among all IITs, I visited.

On 7^th morning, they conducted a written mcq based test, which lasted for 2.5 hours.

Written Test:

Each question carried 3 marks, a wrong answer fetched -1 marks. There were a total of 50 questions from ENTIRE GATE Syllabus except Software Engineering and Web Technologies with a lot of emphasis on Discrete Mathematics (Almost 50%)

Some questions:

1. N mod 10 = 9, N mod 9 = 8, … , N mod 2 = 1; What’s   N?
2. A couple of arrangement questions
3. Some graph theory questions
4. Mathematical Logic based questions
5. Find output of given C Programs
6. Time complexity related questions
7. One question from sorting
8. Questions from Automata Theory (Ranging from Type3 to Type 0 grammar)
9. Question from Lexical Analyzer, Ambiguity, LR/LALR Parsing
10. Data Flow, Sliding Window, TCP/IP, Congestion Control related problems
11. Questions from Concurrency Control, Normalization
12. Pipeline, Cache related problems

They selected approx 87 people for interview, out of which around 37 people were from reserved category.

They provided time slots for interview which kept on getting changed.

During the interview, they asked one question from counting and recurrence relation and another question from algorithm. A typical interview, here, took approx 30-35 minutes and you need to a lot of work in the board. It seemed to me that they didn’t like the fact that I’m currently in an IT organization. I guess my panel would have liked fresh bloods! 😀

Move ahead and see what happened at IIT Kharagpur and at IIT Delhi.

 

IIT Interview Experience – Part II (IIT Madras)

Followed from HERE.

IIT Madras interview experience was pretty good for me.

If I am not wrong, in the brochure, it was mentioned that selection procedure will take place in mid of May. But I really donno why they were in hurry and finally they fixed 26-27 April for the entire procedure.

I reached IITM Campus at around 10 PM on 24^th. We were to report at CCW for accommodation. This particular experience was really bad for me. Rooms provided on double-sharing basis an those were not cleaned at all. Anyway, next day we were to report at Computer Science Department at 8 AM. Written Exam commenced at 9 AM.

Written Exam:

Part 1:

All Compulsory, MCQ and Fill in the blanks type, Questions from quants, C, DS, COA

Total Questions: 10-12 (approximately) Time: 30 Minutes (iirc)

Not All questions had negative markings.

Some questions:

1. Search element in Linked List
2. What will be printed  by following statement : printf(“%d”,scanf(“%d”,&n))
3. Basic Boolean Arithmetic
4. Quantitative  questions from time and distance, percentage calculation, proportion and ratio and simple counting

Part 2:

Subjective Type, Questions from Algorithm, Programming, Discrete Maths, Digital and Computer Organization

There were total 8 equal marks questions, out of which you needed to attempt only 5. Time: 1hr 15 Minutes.

Some Questions:

1. Question from Discrete Math, don’t remember exactly
2. Proof of a Fibonacci identity
3. Find time complexity of a recurrence relation
4. Prove that in a group of 6 people, there are at least three mutual friends or three mutual strangers.
5. An algorithm question to write a pseudo code (easy  array operations)
6. Question regarding designing of sequential circuit
7. Question regarding calculation of memory access time (Calculators were not allowed)
8. Don’t remember

They selected approx 70-80 people for interview. Results were declared around 2:30 PM

After document verification, interview started at around 3 PM.

Interview Experience:

Panel was huge and that’s what I liked. They kept faculty with expertise in every possible area you say as your choice.

Choices were DS, Algorithm, Automata, Compiler, OS, DBMS, Networking, CO etc and they asked to choose one.

I chose both DS and Algorithm saying that they go hand in hand 😉

First Question: Polynomial Evaluation and recurrence relation solving regarding that

Second Question: Linked List and Array Implementation of Stack and Queue, pros and cons

They asked a lot of HR questions too.

They didn’t ask me about any projects. But at some point of time during the interview, panel was silent for some unknown reason!! And I felt uncomfortable and to break the silence, I spoke about my projects and papers and they let me speak.

So, that’s how it came to an end.

The campus is really big, but bus service is frequent. You will find a lot of deers roaming here and there. But the weather was very hot and humid. Apart from mess food, you can find some food zone and food quality is not that bad. 🙂

Check out my experience @IIT Kanpur 🙂

 

IIT Interview Experience – Part I

Followed from THIS…

So, IIT Interview Experiences!  It starts with planning, coz train tickets, these days, are unavailable from day 1 and flight fare increases at alarming rate at last moment! But what happened to me was, I spent all my time in planning only (And it happens to most of us, inferred from other blogs!).

Generally a common query comes into the picture. What should I prepare for Interviews!

Well, generally (not necessarily) the panel would ask you one or two of your favorite subjects and will grill you in that area. So, prepare two subjects well and have another subject as backup, if you want. Revise your gate syllabus once before the interview race commences which would suffice the “basic needs”.  😛

I’ll briefly sum up my interview experiences @IIT Madras (MS), IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Delhi in my next posts. And yea, you have to have a “India tour “ if you don’t rank in single/double digits and you can’t simply apply TSP there.

I prepared Data Structure, Algorithm and Automata Theory as my preferred subjects and my experience suggests that it’s better to have at least one subject from systems as well! Why? You will find by yourself when you visit my experience@ IIT KGP.

Follow what happened @IIT Madras HERE.

 

GATE – A Refreashing Relief (Read that as Experience)

So, after a long time!! I saw everybody writing their GATE experience. And I wanna put up mine too. I read a couple of blogs, may be a number of times, regarding GATE preparation and interview experiences; and those helped a lot. So why not write it up! If anyone find it useful, I would feel happy!

I am, actually, still working in an IT organization (rather, I should say in service industry, coz there’s a BIG difference, I suppose). Frustrated by the “Service-Industry” environment (and many other factors), decided to go for higher study! I regret why I didn’t go for it just after passing Bachelors! Got confused between GRE and GATE! And finally realized, mugging up English words is not my cup of tea!

So started preparing for GATE 2012! A lot of people ask for what are the books to follow! You can get a comprehensive list from various blogs! I followed the flowing ones:

a)      Automata : Martin, Ullman, Peter Linz

b)      Computer Organization: Hamacher Zaky

c)       Compiler : Aho-Ullman

d)      Database: Korth, Navathe

e)      Data Structure and Algorithm: Cormen

f)       Digital: Salivahanan, Mano

g)      Mathematics: Das-Pal 😛 , Rosen

h)      Networking: Forouzan, Tanenbaum

i)        Operating System: Galvin

j)        Software Engineering: Rajib Mall

k)      Web Technologies: w3school

Wikipedia surely was a savior in most of the cases. If you ever got hooked up somewhere, just google it out; and most of the cases you will find that somebody had that same problem before you! For math queries, you can use MathOverflow/Dr. Math and Stackoverflow for Algorithm related queries. These are really helpful! Online video courses are just what you would probably want  – a student-teacher environment where you will be tought(Even, some of them have feedback system too).

For mathematics, Video Lectures of Arthur T. Benjamin from Harvey Mudd College and that of Shai Simonson are pretty good.

For Automata/DS/Algo, I mostly followed NPTEL and MIT OCW and Coursera.

This BLOG pretty much sums up all other helpful blogs and pretty useful!

For preparation, I would say, as teachers say, take notes! Believe me, it would be helpful! I was reluctant at first, but later realized the necessity! Practice would definitely help! And surely, I learnt from this gate exam, you would need LUCK!

Anyway, after all these, I must say I didn’t rank well 😉 and had to depend on interviews! So, heads up! The post will follow my interview experiences!

Find out what happened in the Interviews@ various IITs HERE.

If you are in a hurry or otherwise if you are more of a choosy personality, check out IIT Madras MS Interview Experience from HERE, or IIT Kanpur Experience from HERE, or IIT Kharagpur & IIT Delhi Experience from HERE.

 

Gate or Windows

I don’t know why this happens. This is a particularity about me that I often hesitate to take decision. This shouldn’t be. But this happens. Gate or not! (Gate or windows in heading isn’t a funny one, I guess you, reader can understand it why I put that) Well, I am not going to go for any discussion on Gate any more because I have completely put that out of my mind (I like to use wrong English, err…). What Next? Thinking of doing some sort of programming! Now I am making a start! Huh! Dear reader, this is not a pessimistic post, rather an optimistic one, … took a long time to take the decision. Next is what? Samsung, heh! Well, I am on it. Lets C.  🙂