On-Campus Intern At Oracle - 2019

 

Sanskar Agarwal, Dept. of EEE, reflects upon his life in IITG, and describes some milestones in his journey. He writes about his pre-final year summer internship at Oracle.

Oracle came in a spot round after the first week. I had done a research intern in my sophomore summer, so I couldn’t practice much of coding. Hence, my biggest challenge was to get through the coding round. During my intern at IISc, I practised coding on InterviewBit in my free time. It was in the first two weeks of the fifth semester that I rigorously worked on my coding skills. Oracle’s test was a difficult one, enhanced by the fact that the test pattern was completely unfamiliar. In the test, the first round was MCQ-based and had different sections. Some important topics would be -

• Trees - AVL, Red Black trees, BSTs
• Databases
• Algorithms and flowcharts
• Operating systems
• English

About 20–25 of us were shortlisted for interviews. The interview was to begin in 5 hours. The first round was a coding round wherein we were given two simple questions and asked to write the code on a paper, along with the time and space complexities. I was asked to explain my code. I was able to explain my approach well and the interviewer looked impressed. Then he gave me a puzzle to solve, and thanks to my practice on GFG, I could do it.

About half of us advanced to the next round. The next technical round discussion was mostly on OOPS where the interviewer asked me about different concepts of OOPs and told me to give a real life example of its implementation. It was a detailed discussion wherein we discussed upon overloading, inheritance, compilers, interpreters, scripting and programming languages, etc. It was a decent round, but I had the gut feeling that I wouldn’t make it through as I fumbled at a few places during the interview!

My projects were based on computer vision and my previous intern on Deep Learning and GANs. I was hoping that the discussion would span that direction, but I guess I was unlucky on that front. Almost nothing was asked from my courses or projects or my DL intern. I guess it wasn’t the profile they were targeting. (Oracle primarily is a database centric organization with recent advances in Cloud infrastructure).

I couldn’t make it through to the HR round and went back to hostel. It was about 2:30 AM when I came back. I had hardly reached when I received a call to attend HR round! I went through two HR rounds. I was asked how I felt about my interviews. I honestly replied that I could have done much better. The final HR round was with the VP of the company. I received the selection mail an hour later!