Last updated on Jan. 26, 2021, 5:21 p.m. by pranav19
It had just been around 1-2 months since I had started improving my DSA for interview preparation, when the 1st round (Aptitude test) of Morgan Stanley was scheduled. For those 1-2 months, I had been referring to the most popular interview questions on GFG and was also simultaneously participating in contests conducted on Codechef. Coming back to the aptitude test, the test consisted of 3 sections-
123 students had appeared for the test, out of which 12 were shortlisted for further interview rounds.
Interview round 1:
The interview started with a little discussion about my projects and questions related to API’s as I had used an API in my project. Then the interviewer asked me about the data structures I am proficient in, I replied by saying arrays, Hashmap, stacks, queues. As a follow up to my reply, he asked some theoretical questions on Hash Map and collisions. It was pretty easy so I answered it correctly. Then, he gave me a coding question on stacks but only asked me the approach I would follow and not the code. The question was to implement a parenthesis checker for an expression which can have many types of parenthesis involved. I put forward an approach which seemed to be correct but then he gave me an edge case where it would fail. After giving one more failed approach and him giving me hints of edge cases, I finally got the solution right and he was convinced. Then he gave me a question on spiral traversal of a matrix, but after giving me this question the interviewer had some emergency situation at his place (since it was a virtual interview). So I was told to leave the call and wait for some time. In the meantime, I was ready with the answer to that question which he had given me :-). After about half an hour, my interview was continued and he just asked me the approach because he knew that I might be ready with the answer. The next coding question he gave me was to find all permutations of words from phone digits, a pretty standard Gfg question. I was asked to write code for this one, which I somehow managed using recursion. Finally, he asked the approach for 1-2 more questions which were of moderate level.
Interview round 2:
This interview again started with a discussion about my project but not the same project as earlier. This interview was like a combination of Tech + Behavioural round and I was mainly asked questions which were situation based, like what would you do if your teammate refuses to work for some reason and you have a deadline which is closing in. He didn’t ask me any DS Algo related questions but some tech questions he asked were related to DBMS, System Design (like designing an app like WhatsApp), etc. The interviewer knew that I was a TY student so he didn’t lay much emphasis on system design but at the same time, I answered his questions with the best of my knowledge.
Both the interview rounds were conducted on the same day with a gap of 1-1.5 hours between the 2 rounds. The result was announced a day later and fortunately, I was selected. Both the interviewers were extremely friendly and it felt more like a normal conversation to me rather than an interview.
Some final tips:
Thanks for reading all the way till the end !! :-)