Candidate-Experiences

CTS PAPER ON 3rd MARCH 2008

Hi, this is Sudipta Saha from JIS College of Engineering. We had our first campus interview in 3rd March 2008. We are glad to have a company like Cognizant in our college. I would like to express my experience, in brief.

Selection procedure was first with aptitude test and then Personal Interview. In personal interview, most of us faced mainly technical questions and little bit HR questions. My interview was like this.

I entered the room and said, “Good afternoon sir.”
He not even looked at me and told me to take my seat. Then he said, “Before I ask you some question may I have your introduction?”
I gave a brief introduction.
Then he straightly entered the technical part. He asked, “Which subjects, you think, you are strong?”
I said, “I know C and core java”.
“Any other?”
“I know data structure.”
“You have passed 5 semesters and know only 3 subjects?”
“I had a good preparation of operating system. But during the last 2 months I was busy on preparing only these 3 subjects. So, I don’t think I can recall OS right now.”
Then he asked me some C questions.
“Difference between structure and union.”

Answered.

He showed me a C coding. A union contains an int, a float, a char array and initialized by 2, 4.5, “Hello World\n” respectively. He asked me what would be the output if we try to print all the variables. I answered confidently. But later I came to know that I was wrong.
He asked me “difference between call-by-value and call-by-reference”
Once again he showed me a C coding regarding this topic and asked for the output. I answered.
Then I faced some java questions.
“What are encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism? How does java support these?”

Answered.

“Write a java coding where a class implements an interface.”
I wrote.
“What will happen if there are two classes A and B contain an instance variable p and if a third class C inherits other two classes and try to access the variable p?”
I said, “It is a multiple inheritance concept. And java does not support it.”
He said, “I want the generalized concept.”
I said, “I only know what java supports.”
Then there were some data-structure questions.
He wrote an infix expression and told me to convert it to postfix.
I did it.
He showed me a tree and asked me whether it was binary search tree. I said “no” and explained the reason. He asked me to convert it to binary search tree using post ordered traversal.
His last question was “what is hash table?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
Then he said, “Well, you can go.”
I lend my hand for handshake.  

After 5 hours, names were announced. There were 163 students who get selected. I was one of them.

What I realized that they don’t want you to answer all the technical questions correctly. What they want is that you should not remain silence. They may ask you some little bit conceptual and competitively tough questions to break you somehow but you must not loose your confidence and you have done your job. Try to express your body language as much as possible and speak clear and fluent English. You are selected.