How I landed an internship at JP Morgan Chase & Co. and how can you do so?
JP Morgan Chase & Co. is one of the premier investment banking companies out there. It came to our campus at RV College of Engineering in August 2019, for providing internship offers in Software Engineering positions.
We had an online coding test based on the HackerRank platform which was for 90 minutes and consisted of 2 questions. The questions were pretty easy, and were similar to these questions on GeeksForGeeks-
1. Printing the maximum sum of sub squares of size k in a square of size n. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/print-maximum-sum-square-sub-matrix-of-given-size/
2. A modified version of Josephus’ problem, where the number could be negative too. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/josephus-problem-set-1-a-on-solution/ The only catch was to solve the cases for negative numbers as well.
I was able to solve the first question fully, and complete 6 out of 9 test cases in the second one. Hopefully, I was selected for the interview rounds. There were a total of 60 candidates selected out for 250 candidates.
There were a total of 3 interview rounds, which were Technical Round 1, Technical Round 2, and HR round.
Technical Round 1
It was a coding and general introduction round. The interviewer was a friendly person, and the interview started with the question- Tell me about yourself? I described my interests which were mostly related to Machine learning and Computer Vision. He asked me about ways AI can solve real-world problems, and asked me to name some areas where AI can be beneficial. I answered them to be Environment and Health Care. He then asked me some basic questions related to Operating Systems(Scheduling Algorithms) and then proceeded to ask coding questions, which were,
Tower of Hanoi Problem — Implementation was asked in both recursive and iterative form.
Recursive Approach — https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/c-program-for-tower-of-hanoi/
Iterative Approach — https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/iterative-tower-of-hanoi/
The second problem asked was to find a subset of length k whose sum was equal to any given number n. It was similar to this problem — https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/subarray-of-size-k-with-given-sum/
Then, he asked me about my internship which I did in my second-year summer break, at the Indian Institute of Technology, Palakkad, Kerala. He asked me about the project done at the internship, and questions regarding it, which I confidently answered. After this, the results for first-round were announced and I had cleared it to make way to the second round. A total of 21 out of 60 went to 2nd technical round.
Technical Round 2
This round was taken up by some senior technical manager, and it mainly focused on your resume as well as OOP(Object Oriented Programming) concepts. I was asked questions regarding my projects and I mentioned my projects listed on my Github account. (https://github.com/mohitwildbeast)
Specifically, you need to explain any one project which you can explain properly about, and know all the ins and outs of the project.
Speaking about OOP concepts, we were asked to either code a Snake and Ladder Game or Lift System in any programming language using OOP concepts. This was pretty easy as I made the Sanke and Ladder game using JAVA and included most of the functions and OOP concepts in the application.
All the 21 candidates who were selected for 2nd round, were sent to HR round also.
HR Round
It was a basic HR round and consisted of questions about yourself, why do you want to join the company and other standard HR questions. Just be yourself and polite, and always ask questions back to HR. This indicates that you are really interested in the company and want to join them.
The results were announced after half an hour, and I was selected!!! I couldn’t feel more happy about it.
Some Bits of Advice
- Prepare well for the coding interviews. A good source to start your preparation is Must Do Interview Questions by GeeksforGeeks. https://practice.geeksforgeeks.org/batch/must-do-1
- Make your resume good and list at least 3 good projects on them. Use Github extensively.
- Try doing an internship at the end of 2nd year, be it a startup or any research internship at any institute. You would get exposure and be able to learn a lot during the summer holidays.
