Aditya Bhosale

Goldman Sachs, Risk Round 1, Risk Round 2, Coding Round 1, Coding Round 2

Profile at a Glance:

Pre-Placement Preparation:

I was fairly certain that I only wanted to apply to software, coding and analytics profile. So most of my prep revolved around data structures and algorithms. Not having any work experience or a CS minor, I knew I already had a disadvantage. Also, unfortunately, because of my DDP, I wasn’t able to start my prep until the last week of October which is also when the company tests began.
I was suggested to start by reading the book ‘Cracking the coding interview’ but since I was short on time I decided to jump right in and start solving topic wise problems instead. I would spend an hour or so reading up on a topic and then another 4-5 hour solving problems. I mainly used interviewbit and leetcode for practice. I would suggest starting the prep lot earlier than I did as the company tests take up almost all of your time in November with as many as 6-7 tests everyday except for the end-sem week. Infact, in the last 3-4 days, I decided to give tests for at most 1 company each day as I had already made it into enough shortlists and thought it would be better to focus on interview prep instead.
I was shortlisted for 4 companies on day 1.
● Goldman Sachs
● JP Morgan Chase
● McKinsey Knowledge Centre
● NEC Corporation, Japan
The JPMC shortlist came in the last week and was pretty unexpected as it was a quant profile and I was only able to solve about 9 out of 30 quant problems in the test. They also had 2 coding problems in the test which I was able to solve which is probably why I was shortlisted. But this meant that I needed to prepare for quant interview questions in the last week with no prior practice. I spent an entire day in the last week solving problems from ‘Fifty challenging problems in probability’ by Frederick Mosteller and this other book called ‘Day 1’ by some IIT Madras students.
I did my HR prep only on the day before the interview. If you’re someone who gets nervous easily, I would suggest you start your HR prep earlier and do a few mock interviews with friends to gain confidence. In my opinion, HR questions are the most important questions in an interview. The HR questions are the ones that set you apart from everyone else.

Goldman Sachs

The test had 2 separate sections for coding and quant. The coding section had one coding problem and around 10 MCQs. The quant section had around 15 MCQs. The coding problem was fairly simple and logic based which didn’t require any knowledge of DSA. The quant section was also fairly easy with JEE level math problems. As these sections are for two separate profiles, you’re not expected to be good at both. I know students who only solved the quant section and were shortlisted for the interview.

Interview experience

GS was the only interview I had in slot 1. My first round was scheduled at 8:30 am. I slept for only 3 hours the night before. When I reached the venue the next morning, the interviews of some students had already started. There were 3 profiles for which candidates were being interviewed: coding, quant, and risk. I was called for the first round after about 15 mins.

Risk: Round 1

Round 1 only had 1 interviewer. She asked me to tell her about myself. I gave the answer I had prepared. After that, she asked me to wait in the room and she left. After a couple of minutes, another person entered the room and took the interviewer’s seat. I found it a bit odd but I guess the first interviewer realized that I wasn’t looking for the profile her team was offering.
The new interviewer then asked me 2 coding problems:
● Given a list of 99 distinct numbers between 1 to 100 in no particular order, find the missing number in the list.
● Implement a version queue data structure and a method to print all previous versions of the queue.
I answered both questions. He asked for a different solution for the second question than the one I gave. I gave a different solution after taking a hint. He then asked me why I wanted to work at Goldman Sachs and not some other financial firm? He also asked what kind of job profile I would be most interested in.

Risk: Round 2

For this round, there was a panel of 2 interviewers. One of them was the same interviewer from round 1. This round was relatively chill. They basically wanted to know why I wanted to work in finance when all my previous experience has been in research.
My BTP was on radius based nearest neighbor searching. The interviewer asked how I could use my radius based algorithm to implement a kNN algorithm. I gave a somewhat satisfactory answer. He then asked a simple coding question (how will you find the kth largest number from a stream of numbers) followed by a couple of simple follow-up questions on heaps.
The second interviewer then asked me how I would design a system such as an online shopping website to handle hundreds of thousands of requests per second. I didn’t have any experience with distributed systems which I told them honestly but I explained using a load balancer and message queues.
At the end of the interview, I asked a few questions about the role and asked him if he could tell me about one of the most interesting projects he has worked on to get an idea of the kind of work his division handles. We had a nice discussion on this topic.

Coding: Round 1

This round was a lot more coding intensive. The interview started with a “tell me about yourself” and then went right into coding problems.
● Given an array, for each element find the first value to it’s right greater than that element.
● Write a function to print a permutation of an array of distinct elements such that each permutation is equally likely to occur.
● Find the minimum number of swaps required to sort an unsorted array.

I was able to solve the first 2 myself and the last one after a few hints. At the end of the interview, I asked some questions about the role, career path, and the work culture.

Coding: Round 2

This one was an absolute nightmare. After the usual ‘tell me about yourself’, he asked me a question from graph theory. As I was short on time during the prep, I had completely left out graphs. The question was,
● Given a connected graph, find the set of edges such that if one of the edges belonging to this set is removed, the graph becomes disconnected.
I somehow managed to come up with the correct algorithm after a lot of hints but there wasn’t enough time to write the code for it as all the other interviews were already over and everyone had left.
After the last interview, I was not at all expecting to get an offer. So I rushed back to the hostel, had some food while reading up and taking notes on the 3 companies in slot 2 and rushed back to H16 for slot 2.

I was completely burnt out at this point and had a terrible headache. I first went to give the NEC interview as I knew it would go well and I needed a good interview to recover from the last one. While I was waiting outside the interview room, a friend of mine who was also waiting for the interview saw the blog and told me that I made it into GS. I think I was happier because I didn’t have to give any more interviews than the fact that I got the job.

This also means that unfortunately, I don’t have any more interview experiences to share. Here are some of the interview tips:
● Be honest. This is, in my opinion, the most important thing to remember while answering any HR question. Don’t misrepresent yourself as someone you aren’t just to get a job. Instead, only focus on your strengths that align with the job requirements.
● Have a 3-4 line description ready for each project and internship you have on your resume. It’s easy to give a long description of a project but often difficult to summarize it in a few sentences. Use the STAR method to prepare these summaries (google ‘star method’)
● If you have interviews in slot 1, get something to eat for the morning the night before. You don’t want to walk around searching for food right before the interviews. Also, carry some food and a bottle with you.
● With GS, you don’t have to ace every interview. My roommate last year actually asked the interviewer if an interview with one team affects his chances with other teams after he completely messed up his quant interview and the interviewer said no. He later got an offer from one of the other teams.