We congratulate Bhavya Aggarwal of NSIT 3rd year for getting selected in Goldman Sachs as a Summer Tech Analyst Intern. We thank him for sharing his interview experiences with this student community.

Profile Overview:
Name of the Company: Goldman Sachs
Profile: Summer Analyst (Technology)
Duration: 2 Months
Stipend: INR 75,000 Per Month

Goldman Sachs came to recruit students for its Summer Internship on 29th July 2017. Interviews were held on 30th July 2017. First, students were shortlisted on the basis of percentage. First cut-off was 62.5% with 0 backlogs. Then the second cut-off for the online coding round came around 70.5%. They selected around 200 students for online coding round of which 23 were selected for the interviews. In the end 9 students were selected for internship in June-July 2018.

Round 1(Online Round)

There were two coding questions and 5 MCQ.

Coding Questions

Q1: Given a string of words separated by spaces. Find the first maximum length even word from the string. Eg: “You are given an array of n numbers” The answer would be “an” and not “of” because “an” comes before “of”. geeksforgeeks similar question: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/program-find-smallest-largest-word-string/ . Just check if it is even length or not.

Q2: Given the first names and last names for n students. All the students can make their handles from their first name or last name. Then we are given a permutation of students. We have to check if the order of handles according to the permutation is lexicographically sorted or not. For eg lets assume there are two students:

	Firstname Lastname

      	a 		c

	b   		f

	e		d

If the permutation is “1 2 3” then we can choose the handles as “a, b, d” and they would be in lexicographical order. But if the permutation is “3 2 1” then we can not choose handles such that the order is lexicographically sorted. Codeforce question link: http://codeforces.com/problemset/problem/472/C

MCQs:

Q1 Given an array of integers, what is the minimum time complexity for finding the minimum length of subarray such that sum of the subarray is greater than x. a) n^2 b) n c) n*logn d) logn

Q2 Given a binary tree with k nodes have 2 children and l leaves. Find the relation between k and l. a) l = 2k + 1 b) l = k + 1 c) l = 2*k d) None of these

Q3 Given an array of size. Implement a circular queue of n-1 elements. Initially Front = Rear = 0. Give the correct condition for empty and full queue.

Interviews

I had 3 technical interviews whereas some students had 2 technical and 1 HR interviews.

Technical Interview - 1

The interview was aimed at checking the thinking ability of the students. This round consisted of more number of puzzles than coding questions. Q1 25 horses puzzle ( http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/puzzle-9-find-the-fastest-3-horses/ ) Q2 Measure 45 min from two candles which take 1hr each to burn from one end ( https://techpuzzl.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/measure-45-minutes-using-2-candles/ ) They asked more puzzles like these. Then he asked some coding questions:

Q1 Given a string containing words, calculate the number of hard words and easy words in the string. Hard word is a word having number of consonants greater than 4 or number of consonants greater than number of vowels. Write the function for this problem. Similar quesrtion: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/calculate-difficulty-sentence/

Q2 Given the arrival and departure timings for the trains, calculate the minimum number of platforms required to manage all the trains. Question: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-number-platforms-required-railwaybus-station/

Technical Interview - 2

The coding questions had to be solved on paper in the given time frame. Q1 Write a program to find the minimum element in a stack. Question: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/design-and-implement-special-stack-data-structure/ Q2 Write a program to find the largest k elements from an array of n numbers. Question: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/k-largestor-smallest-elements-in-an-array/ Q3 Given two jugs of capacity 3L and 5L, measure 4L using the jugs. Question: http://www.programmerinterview.com/index.php/puzzles/measure-4-liters/

Technical Interview - 3

Q1 Given an array of n numbers find the minimum length subarray such that its sum is equal to x. Similar Question: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-length-subarray-sum-greater-given-value/ Q2 We are allowed to make a jump of 1 or any prime numbered jump starting from the 0th stair. Count the number of possible ways to reach the nth stair. Similar Question: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/count-ways-reach-nth-stair/ .

The interviews also included some basic questions which were just discussed, for example, binary search.

The panelist also asked a couple of direct questions from CRUX Book,a book on Java that I Co-Authored with Apoorvaa Gupta and our mentors Sumeet Sir and Rishab Sir under Coding Blocks. (The questions that I had created :P)

I would like to thank all my mentors from Coding Blocks - Arnav Sir, Prateek Sir, Rajesh Sir, Priyanshu Sir for constant support and guidance. I wouldn’t think twice before accepting that my experience and skill enhancement at Coding Blocks is the reason behind my success at the interview.

Bhavya Aggarwal
3rd Year
NSIT