I was recently selected for the prestigious D E Shaw Ascend Educare Program, as one among the 40 girls from all over India. I am sharing my interview experience here so that people appearing for internships or mentorships at D E Shaw can get an insight into the process.
Round 1: Essay and Resume
- This was an elimination round where we had to submit a self-nomination and a resume detailing our previous accomplishments and what makes one a compelling candidate for the program.
- Students who cleared this round were invited for a Hackerrank test.
Round 2: Hackerrank Online Test
- This test was taken on Hackerrank with proctoring. It comprised of three sections:
- Section 1: Aptitude: Questions included were mostly from probability, profit, and loss, and covering most of the syllabus of quantitative aptitude. the questions in this round were of medium-hard difficulty level,
- Section 2: Computer Science Fundamentals: This section comprised of questions from time complexity, DBMS, and OOPs and also some bug finding questions
- Section 3: Coding: This section consisted of three coding questions which were of medium to the hard difficulty level. One of the questions in this section was very tough, and only a few candidates were able to solve it. Hence, students who completed even half of this question were invited for further rounds.
Round 3: Technical Interview
- The majority of candidates were eliminated from the previous round, and only a few reached the interview round.
- The technical interview was conducted on Hackerrank’s CodePair platform. It was an approx 45 minute round that started off with an introduction followed by the following questions.
- The interviewer first asked me about all the data structures that I was comfortable with, and I was completely honest with him and told him that I was familiar with all the basics as well as some advanced data structures. He then asked me the following questions.
- Given a number, delete that number from a linked list,: This question seems easy at first, however it was quite tricky as we are not given the head of the LinkedList. I got confused at first because I thought that I had to delete that node, however on reading the question repeatedly I realized that we only have to delete the number.
- After figuring out what the question asked of me, I explained my approach to the interviewer. He was quite satisfied with it and then asked me to code up the solution and I did.
- Design a data structure with O(1) delete, insert, get random(): This was a tough question for which I required some hints, and after that, I was able to come up with a solution. This question was then modified by the interviewer with duplicates allowed as well.
- Internal implementations of the heap, Binary Search Tree: D E Shaw is a company that focuses a lot on in-depth questions from your language. Since my language was Java, I was also asked Java-specific questions such as: Why is the Java platform independent? Declaration of arrays in Java? Memory allocation of arrays in Java
- Questions on searching algorithms.I was asked to list the searching algorithms that I was familiar with and was asked questions around binary search and ternary search.
- This marked the end of my technical interview after which I got a call that I had cleared the technical interview and was scheduled for an HR interview.
After the HR interview, I got an email saying that I was selected and that was the happiest moment of my life. This was all about my experience.
Hope this helps!!