IIIT-Allahabad M.Tech selection process

With this article, I'll acquaint the reader with the full interview process of IIIT-Allahabad M.Tech Course in Software Engineering, linking with my own experience of my selection.

If you are just preparing for GATE, you should solve more and more questions. And for that I would recommend GKP Publisher's Question Bank. Although there are some mistakes in the book for solutions to some problems, but I recommend this book solely for the huge collection of problems it has.

After an initial shortlisting based on GATE scores, names of 148 students were posted on their site who were called for the Written Test + Coding Test to be held on 1st of June and Interview of qualified students on 2nd. I received my admit card 7 days before the test. Kudos to Bharatiya Daak for their crappy service, a friend of me had received 15 days ago.

I reached Allahabad on 31st May night, and stayed at a relative's residence. On 1st June I reached IIIT-A campus at around 8:30. The auto-fare from station is just Rs.5 so don't think that being in the outskirts of the city it is very far as mentioned in Admit Card that the fare would be Rs.70-100. I guess, it is around 7-8 kilometers from railway station.
I was greeted by the guards, who were very co-operative. I was directed towards the boys hostel. I entered the mess. To my surprise, it was completely Air Conditioned and very well maintained and clean. I drank some water and cooled myself, as the North Indian heat had struck me on the way hard! Yes, at 8:30AM it was very hot in Allahabad! I believe, the temperature was 42+ at that time! In the mess itself I met my net friend Shailesh Sharma who too was shortlisted and had arrived for the admission process. We had got introduced to each other through this blog itself through my post GATE-2010 Solutions. I got introduced to his friend Vipin and we were now a group of three! At 9:30 we headed out towards the academic campus. Our written test started at 10.
The paper consisted of 100 objective questions to be solved in three hours. There were tricky questions from C, followed by Java, some very easy questions from data structures, some easy ones from SQL, and then from software engineering. Overall, the paper was deviating 80% from the provided syllabus. In first 20 minutes, C questions had trapped me and I had solved only 10 of them. Later I changed my gear and by the end of 50 minutes, I had marked all 100 questions. There was no negative marking so there was no fear of wrong answers. Marking the answers on the answer sheet took me another 40 minutes because of bigger bubbles and use of ball point pen for filling the bubbles. The question paper lacked quality standards. There were inconsistent questions, and weird ones too. Some seemed to have wrong options too. Anyways, we finished. I believe, I must have got around 70 questions right. We headed out for lunch.

At 2PM we went for the coding test. The lab had computers running Windows and Linux(Ubuntu 9.04). Student was free to choose his/her environment. I chose windows thinking that they may put me on vi editor if I chose Linux and as I am not much comfortable with vi, as well as touch typing. I saw that there was no CUI, but a GUI environment had been provided on Linux systems so I switched to a Linux system thinking about the added advantage of synatx highlighting of gedit. Windows people had option to use Turbo C++, or Microsoft Visual C++ or Dev C++. Linux users had good old GCC.
All the computers were on LAN and we had to open a URL in our browsers where Online Judge software was running. The software was coded in PHP. We had to upload the source file after coding. The compilation and evaluation on random inputs was to be done by the software itself. If the software was satisfied with our code it would give us points. But there was a catch. The way of giving input was pre-specified and exactly the program was required to receive input that way only. And the required output too was given in a pre-specified manner. This was because the code was run by a script, not a human being. Being dumb, a script can't accept anything deviating even slightly from the specified standards.

There were three questions in the paper. First was of 20 marks. Second one of 35 and third one of 45 marks. The time alotted was 3 hours. The questions were easy but I felt that I'll have problems in designing the input module because the language to be used were C or C++. I thought, if I were allowed to use PHP, I would churn out these questions within 5 minutes each. explode() function in PHP would easily let me process the input, the way I wanted. But I had to work with C and there was no explode. I was unable to take the input in required form and put it into a data structure for further processing and output. I coded the processing and output modules for 1st and 3rd questions but couldn't code the input module. Then I attacked the 2nd question and cracked it easily. I was sweating heavily in the Air Conditioned lab. As soon as my 2nd question's answer was accepted by the script I took a sigh of relief.

I checked the time and 2 and half hours had passed already. I checked the current results. This facility was provided by the Online Judge software. We could see which student had submitted correct answers. There was one girl at rank 1 who had solved 2 questions i.e. 1 and 3. She had 65 points. I was at rank 2 with 35 marks because 2nd question was worth 35 marks. There were 15 students behind me, each with 20 marks, who had solved the first question. Out of the rest, noone else could solve any program!!!
I re-attacked the 3rd question to process the input anyhow. I cursed myself for forgetting the strtok() function's syntax which would easily let me solve the 1st and 3rd questions. Strtok() works a bit similar to the explode() function in PHP. I thought I should code my own explode() function in C and I started off for the same. I reached very near but the time was up, by then! I checked current rankings. I was still at rank 2, behind that girl.
The authorities announced that those whose programs were running manually but were not accepted by the Online Judge software could get their programs verified by invigilators and get some marks. Many students who were not in Online Judge's ranking list raised their hands and were getting their programs verified. Some claimed that they have solved all three but none was accepted by online judge. I thought in my mind, even if they get more marks and I get rejected I'm still a better programmer than them because my program followed the standard defined in the problem. Anyways, the process ended after sometime. We were advised to wait for an hour for the declaration of result. We roamed through the college. At around 7PM the result was declared. Out of 148 appeared, 56 were shortlisted for the interview to be carried out next day. I was there in the list!

Shailesh and Vipin too were there. We bid good night and parted away happily thinking about the next day.
On 2nd day, we reached for the judgement day! Everyone was in formals. We were made to sit in the auditorium from where we were called for the interview one by one based on the roll number. My roll no. was 142 so I was relaxed that my interview will take time. First Vipin was called, being early in the sequence, followed by Shailesh. Finally my turn came. My interview went very pathetic. When I was asked 'tell me about yourself', I mentioned about IndiFun. Then I was asked 5 questions from the theory of social networking each going well above my head.
Then I was caught by another interviewer who was a guest lecturer from IIT Khargapur. He asked me my favourite subject. I said - databases! He asked me to define functional dependency. I spoke: an attribute B is said to be functionally dependent on an attribute A if for each unique value of A there exists a unique value in B. Then he asked, what is the mathematical term for that. Within a fraction of second I recalled about functions and two obvious answers came to my mind - one one, and one one onto. I was also frustrated due to the early 5 questions that had gone beyond me. I spoke one one onto and felt that I've made a blunder!!! He asked, where did you read this? I said Elmasri and Navathe. Then after a pause of a second, I continued, I read about functional dependencies in Elmasri and Navathe but not the fact that this is one one onto function. Then he asked, considering functional dependency define 3NF. I got confused over 3NF and BCNF. I started speaking about BCNF then stopped, beg pardon and said a table is in 3NF if it is in 2NF and every non-key attribute is non-transitively dependent on all the candidate keys. He said go.
I went out thinking about those 5 questions that hit me in a row. I thought I don't need to see the result, as I won't be selected. But a hope kept me on. The result was declared at 7. Out of 56, there were 15 selected in General category! My name was there at 9th position in the alphabetically sorted list!

I had a sigh of relief! Finally I got into an India level institution. Shailesh and Vipin too made into the 15 lucky people list. I believe the final result was made up based on GATE score, written test score, coding test score and interview, where interview had a lesser weightage. If it had higher weightage, I would have definitely been ousted!
Our classes are going to start from July 9th. That was my experience with IIIT-A selection process :) Will keep you posted with the further developments in my life/career.

IIIT-B Interview

If you are just preparing for GATE, you should solve more and more questions. And for that I would recommend GKP Publisher's Question Bank. Although there are some mistakes in the book for solutions to some problems, but I recommend this book solely for the huge collection of problems it has.

On the destined date I reached Bangalore for my IIIT-B interview. Bangalore is quite a happening city. Contrary to the fact pointed out by my acquaintances that you will have language problems in Bangalore, everyone seemed to understand Hindi and English. On 5th morning at 7AM I boarded a bus from Majestic for Electronics City. It took around 45 minutes for the AC Volvo called Vayu Vajra by BMTC, to churn out 15KMs, traffic being a bottleneck. I was greeted by the Electronics City flagship Infosys campus. It is very huge and a live example of engineering and architectural excellence. After asking a few passers-by about the where-abouts of IIIT-B we finally found the campus which has an HP go-down(housed in Infosys campus) in its front, Siemens to the left, Infosys to the front right. As I entered the campus I noticed a gathering of several GATE qualified padhaku students. I took an stroll around the campus with inquisitive eyes, and then entered into the academic block from the rear!!! As I entered inside, I was awestruck at the beauty of the interior. After I detected my goof, I went to the main entrance and got my attendance marked. Then I was directed to head towards Main Class Room 106. There, lots of students and their guardians were seated, and catered by the student volunteers. The main class room had four large projected screens and the student volunteers were running presentations about the college on them and helping the candidates with the interview process. They were all very co-operative. Some YouTube videos were also being played. The internet connectivity through WiFi was extremely fast there and I saw a 4 minute video getting buffered in less than 30 seconds.
At around 12 I went for my documents verification and was then carried to the interview place. There were around 20 cabins in which 20 people were interviewing the candidates. After a couple of minutes I was directed towards a cabin. I asked for the permission to enter and went into the chamber. The man inside offered me a seat, I thanked and seated myself onto the chair.
My interview session lasted for around 15-20 minutes. The first thing he asked me was: Tell me about yourself for three minutes. I started off with the by hearted answer that consisted of Name, Location, Schooling, Current activity, Hobbies and Interests in that order. Instead of 3 minutes, I ran out of data in 1 minute only!!!
Then he asked me about my blog, about which I had stated in the hobbies category. I spoke. He cross-questioned, how many followers do you have? I said two, as of now, but I receive 100+ unique visitors per day according to log stats. He asked me why don't you concentrate on converting visitors to followers? I said, I didn't have this idea earlier, my main motto was to acquaint people with my experiences with computers, but now as you have told me I'll concentrate on this thing too.
Then he asked me. Ok, start with the technical topic you have prepared and continue for five minutes. I started off with my Socket Communication topic and explained things bringing everything down to basic level. During the course of describing the UDP server I forgot something and stopped, then asked him for a few seconds to recall and reorganize all the data inside my brain. He gave me time and after 3 seconds I resumed.
After I finished, he said you can communicate well, but not because you have a very good command over spoken english but because you have a deep understanding of the topic you are explaining. I said yes sir, my mothertongue is not english and I have spoken english very little so I don't have very good command over spoken english. He told, who says you can't speak? You spoke perfectly well. Communication means when you speak socket, I should hear it as socket not ice cream! I agreed!
Then he started looking at my academics. He said you're having nice academics. Your GATE score of 614 and marks 42.33 is very high and you're probably in the 98th percentile. I said yes, 98.59 to be precise. He said, it is a very good score. I replied, not very good but it is just fine, I could have scored 60+ if only I hadn't made those silly mistakes which I realized while matching the solutions on v-day evening. Then he said, which subjects you were most excited about in your B.Tech. I replied DBMS and Networking. He said, ok you've been given a table, can you say whether it is in third normal form and if it is not, then can you convert it in 3NF? Backed with my expertise in Functional Dependencies & Normalization I said, yeah with hundred percent surety, and proceeded ahead.
After this he asked me, how do you spend your time. I said, I am not into arts so no music, no singing. But I play chess, do some photography and most of the extra time I spend managing my site. Then he asked me about the site. I explained about IndiFun using the word Mobile Social Networking. He stressed on the phrase and said me to explain it. I explained about GPRS and tiny browsers and mobile markup languages. He said, how does this site connect people. I narrated all the features of IndiFun like an advertiser!!!!
Then he said, according to your academics and your extra-curricular activities you are a very deserving candidate. I would love to have you here. But the interview is a very tiny part of the whole selection process. My best wishes for you.
And said, if you have any questions then ask me. I asked, please tell me about yourself. He said, I run a company called Radix Learning which works with IIIT-B and also I teach here data structures in PGDSD course, not in M.Tech course. I said, I would like to keep in touch with you after I get selected. He said no! I don't interact with M.Tech students!
After that he said go happy, you seem to be a very promising candidate. I thanked him, shook hands and left the cabin.
Some photos that I took, follow:

My Life's First Interview

Part-1: The Prologue
December 28th, 2009 is a red letter day I'll always remember. This day marks my first rendezvous with the corporate world with an interview, with an L-turn from academia. On 27th, I appeared in the last written exam of B.Tech and on the very next day I went on to face an interview and cleared it in one go! Moreover, out of several candidates(I guess around 30-40 or more) I was the only one selected!!!! Thats enough to pump up my confidence manifolds! Well, so here I'm going to describe my experience with the maiden interview.
The interview was for a FREE 6-months industrial training(my ing university compells everyone to have a 6-months training in whole 7th or 8th semester). I already had got a seat booked in HCL CDC for a paid training. So, I was thinking about NM Infotech for free training. Here goes the description of the day that passed :)
Myself and Ajit reached the company office in Mohali at around 10:50AM. We were the first to reach. We were greeted by the receptionist and after formalities she instructed us to be ready for the Aptitude test. As we were waiting, another candidate(a girl) arrived with her parents. In a couple of minutes the receptionist handed us the aptitude test paper. I was presuming that it should be an math/IQ paper but it was basically a computer aptitude paper with questions ranging from the standard comment syntax in cpp, to the inventor of punched cards, the scale of KIPS and the coiner of term C++. Many of the questions seemed to be obsolete. For example: there was a question - What is the word length of a personal computer? The options were 4,8,16 and 64-bits. I said to myself: "Wtf?! There is no 32-bit." Then the obsoletion of other questions too came to my mind. And I wrote 32 myself!!! ROFl
Also, a question was asking "To measure which thing's performance do we use KIPS." I was surprised at KIPS. Now a days everything is in GIPS. Who the f will use KIPS? Frankly speaking, the aptitude test paper gave me a bad impression of the company. I thought, they aren't technically aware at all. Whatever... I finished the paper in 5 mins. and submitted in 10. Receptionist had told us that you must do it within 30 mins. After sometime we were handed over the technical paper. Some more candidates had joined. This set had good quality questions. The first one was a C question from pointers. 2nd one was about a for loop without any increment of the counter, meanwhile it also checked candidate's perception of the relation between int and char data types in C. Another one was a multi-dimensional array declaration i.e. int a[3][3][2]={5, 6, .............. etc.}. The question was what will be stored at a[2][2][0]. I pwn3d that question as I looked at it, thanks to GATE preparation! The second section was from databases. The questions were from Oracle's theory part(I guess). I guessed a few answers in this section. A person came and asked whether the paper was tough? I guess he had set the paper and was expecting some appreciation of his intellect. I replied- the previous one was pretty easy, this one is a bit tough, but not much. Meanwhile some more candidates had arrived and they too joined the bandwagon. In a cabin beside ours, an interview session of an MBA guy was going on. The HR girl (oh my god!) had excellent communication skills. My ears were on the session. I thought, if she interviews me I'll be disqualified in one go! The way, she uttered and pumelled english was brilliantly appreciable. Later, I said to myself to console myself:"Don't worry dude, she knows nothing except churning english!". Anyways, the third section had questions from networking. I knew a few beginning questions that were from the OSI model. But then some questions from CCNA courses got off my head. I skipped them and finished the paper and submitted it. After sometime, it was announced that we should be ready for the interview.

Part-2: The Interview
I was surprised when my name was called out first for the interview. That was because I had obtained the highest marks in the written test. As I entered, I saw two smart, young, energetic men sitting inside waiting for me. I was offered a seat and I said thanks and sat down on the middle chair among the three in front of them. The first one said to me, Mr. Prabhakar, your score in the written test is quite low, 13 in the first and 10 in the second. I said to myself: because the level of the question paper was too substandard and I can prove this right here right now right away that I am correct and I don't deserve such an evaluation. He asked me to introduce myself. After a formal introduction he asked for my family background. After these basics, he took out my resume and started scanning it, stopping at the Technical Skills section he asked me about PHP. I started off with an introduction to PHP and as soon as I uttered the word "Open Source" - he asked me its meaning. After explaining it, I continued my intro to PHP where I said "...it is a web scripting language used for designing dynamic pages..." He interrupted me there and asked "not static pages?" I said "yes, static ones too". He continued to scan my resume and asked for my strengths. I replied "Programming, databases and networking". He stuck at the word Linux in my resume and asked me "What is Linux?". As a recorded tape, I spoke about Linux. The next question was about the differences between Linux and Windows. I cited many of them. Then he started with FTP and asked me the port number. As I said 21, he asked me - "only 21?", probably thinking that it will get off my head. I said to myself - "not a tough one for me" and replied "21 for control communication and 20 for data connection". He was surprised! That one I guess was a great impact on him. From there on, he believed there is a lot hidden inside me. He asked about SMTP, POP, IMAP etc. and I beat them all. Then he asked me the basic difference between POP and IMAP. As I murmured two trivial ones(one of them the full forms and another the port numbers!), I recalled one which I thought he wants me to speak. And I said - "In case of POP, when we retrieve the mails, they get deleted from the server but in case of IMAP, they stay back". He said - "yes, thats what I wanted to know". Then he got back to Linux and asked me how to install software on Linux. I told him the tar -xzvf, ./configure, make, make install way. He cross questioned me about the utility of the switch "z", but I couldn't recall cuz I had read that long ago and I surrendered at that. He made me feel light by saying "No issues.". Then he asked me about rpm package installation process. Freaking hell! I couldn't recall the "rpm -ivh" command then, which I recalled as soon as I came out of the interview chamber!!!! Anyways, I told him that I haven't used red hat based distros, I have used Ubuntu which uses synaptic and I told him about the apt-get thingy. He didn't seem to be interested in Ubuntu. Anyways, this didn't give him bad impression at all. He turned back towards networking and asked me about https. Hilariously I recall, I answered - "When I see a lock icon beside my browser's URL box, I get to know https is at work!" ROTFL!!!!! Then, from his expressions I felt he is inquiring me something typical that not everyone knows. And guess what? I told him the port number 443 for https!!!!! But then, again, composing myself I started off- "https can use one of the two protocols SSL and TLS. SSL is the older one and stands for Secure Sockets Layer, TLS is the newer sibling standing for Transport Layer Security. Just for an example, consider a person A, browsing the Internet on a WiFi network and another guy - the evil one, using a packet sniffer to trap his communication. The evil guy won't be able to get anything because he is eavesdropping from the data link layer but the person A's browser is encrypting all the vital data in the transport layer itself before passing it to the lower layers!". Hearing this, he was non-plussed!!! He said to me - "You've very good knowledge of computers, I appreciate your cognition of computer science principles". I felt elated. Then he turned above towards application layer and asked me about DNS. I spoke about the need of DNS. Then he put forward the next question in front of me, thinking that this will go beyond my head. He asked - "Which record do we consult for resolving the hostname to IP address?". As soon as he had spoken the 2nd word of the question i.e. "record", I guessed non-deterministically that he is asking about the A record. As he finished the question, my non-determinism had turned into determination and I answered "A record!" He was surprised again. Then he asked me about the MX record. I spoke about the mailbox resolution thingy. Then asked me something bigger, I couldn't quite understand his question. I requested him to clarify the question. He repeated the long one again, and I didn't quite get the question again. I thought, it would be better to skip it. I said confidently "Sorry Sir, I don't know!". Then he asked me about the CNAME record. I said it stands for canonical name and is used for aliasing of domain names. Then he asked me about the record name for reverse DNS. I said "I know it but I don't have it on my tongue right now". He said PTR? I answered excitingly recalling PTR "Yes, PTR, thats it!". Finally he said, you have cleared the technical round of the interview. He told me about the courses, the company is going to train me on. He said to me, that you will get a job right here in NM Infotech after the completion of your training on RHCSS course. I kept nodding my head in affirmation. Then he told that you cleared technical round, but the HR round is left. "So, what do you know about NM Infotech?". I said, I had visited company's site last night and I needed 6-months training so I thought I should try my hand on NM Infotech and so I am here in front of you. He congratulated me on clearing the interview, and I left the chamber.

After me, many candidates went inside but none of them was able to sustain more than 5 mins. My session had been around 15-20 mins. long. I got my confirmation letter and left the premises with a smile on my successful clearance of my life's first ever interview.