Ekansh Preet
| Name: | Ekansh Preet Singh |
| Course: | Information Technology |
| College: | Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology |
| Year: | 2010 |
| Company: | Amazon |
| Package Offered: | 15 LPA |
| Preparations: | I prepared for it mainly in the summer break before placements. However since I started late, I really had to put in a lot of effort in the last 2 months. Majority of my time I dedicated to C, DS and algorithms alongwith with a little bit of OS. |
| Books Reffered: | Test your C skills and Exploring C are important with respect to written rounds. For interviews, your basics should be strong. Let Us C, Data Structures by YK, Crack the Interview were some of the other books I referred to and then ofcourse the Internet. |
| Websites Reffered: | Google !! That is the best resource. Just search for interview puzzles and interview questions and you will run into enough stuff to last you a lifetime. |
| The Written round: | The written round consisted of 20 questions, 18 MCQs and 2 programming questions. The MCQs comprised of both technical and aptitude questions, more technical than aptitude. The 2 programming questions required to write a function for a given problem statement. |
| The Interview: | I faced 3 interviews each lasting for about an hour to an hour and a half.
My first interview the main question that I was asked was the rat in a maze problem and half a dozen variations of the same. Apart from just the algorithm, they were also interested in how well you can code. This was followed by around 4-5 more questions, some heard, some unheard. All in all, the interview went well and gave me a lot of confidence. The third interview of mine was with their head, and it was what the Amazon people call as the bar-raiser interview. This was easily the best interview I have ever faced, not in terms of I nailed it as believe me it was also the toughest, but just because the questions they asked were new and thought-provoking. They werent looking at the answers here but more at your style of thinking. It started with concepts of networking and OS and the interviewer went on to ask me various problems which he said they faced at Amazon and how would I go about solving them and developing algorithms for the same. |
| Role of Internships and extracurricular activities: | In two of my interviews, I was asked about a project of mine that I liked the most. Thankfully, I had a problem of plenty here and I basically needed to choose from amongst the 2 Google Summer of Code projects of mine. I finally went with my GSoC 2010 project. Internships and projects do play an important role in your placements, but only if you actually learn something and do something there. An internship just for the sake of certificate serves no purpose. Students should do atleast one or two good, interesting projects either under a teacher or as an intern or make something just by themselves so that they learn something. |
