I recently gave an interview and got selected to join the Makers Lab at Tech Mahindra for an internship in summer 2024.

I will be a part of their Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team and work on projects in that field.

In this blog, I outline my experience interviewing for an internship at Tech Mahindra and some tips that I found useful for the preparation.

What Questions Were Asked?

The interview was extremely resume oriented.

My interviewer literally had my resume printed out infront of him and he asked me questions from it.

To start off, the interviewer asked for a brief introduction of myself and then proceeded to ask questions about my projects.

I kept my introduction of around 40-60 seconds. I had three projects on my resume and he asked questions from all three of them.

For some context, the projects were:

1. Machine Learning project surrounding housing price prediction

2. Python project where I created a terminal based NBA game

3. A robotic car built using Arduino, in a team of 5 people.

For all three of the projects, these questions were common:

1. What was the project about? / What was the project for?

2. What problems did I face while doing the project and how did I overcome them?

3. What was my contribution to the project? (For a team project)

Apart from the common questions, the interviewer really dived into Machine Learning theory and asked me ML specific questions for the Housing Price prediction project.

Some of those questions were:

1. What strategies did you use to clean the data?

2. Why did you use the XGBoost Regressor? What advantage did it give you over any other model?

3. How is XGBoost better than using a simple Decision Tree or the Random Forest Regressor?

4. What's the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning?

Moving on, he asked me about my experience with Python and if I could tell some differences between Python2 and Python3.

Lastly, he asked some Makers Lab and Tech Mahindra specific questions, if I knew something about the projects that they had over at Makers Lab.

Is The Interview Easy?

Since the interview was mainly around my resume, so yes, it was fairly easy.

Moreover, the interviewer told me beforehand that the interview will be resume oriented. Hence I was able to clear the interview with a day's preparation.

Also worth mentioning, no DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms) questions were asked.

I don't know the reason, but I'm guessing it was because of the nature of the internship, it's very Machine Learning and Aritificial Internship oriented.

Preparation Strategy And Some Tips

Here are some tips that helped me prepare better for the interview:

• Prepare your introduction beforehand; Don't improvise during the interview.

• Keep your introduction less than 90 seconds; Give priority to relevant topics, in my case, it was my interest in Machine Learning and AI.

• Know your resume well. Utilize the STAR method to break down each project:

  • Situation: How comfortable were you with the technologies used before starting the project? Did you have enough or less time to complete it?

  • Task: What was the project about and what was the motivation behind it? What problems did you face along the way?

  • Action: How did you complete the project? What solutions did you come up with?

  • Result: How did the project turn out?

• Prepare ML theory, especially the theory used in any of your projects.

• Research about the company well enough to be able to have an informed discussion on it; Try to identify areas about the business that you like.

• Have questions for the interviewer prepared beforehand.

This was my experience interviewing for Tech Mahindra and some tips that helped me prepare for the interview.

I try to be consistent with my blogs but college has kept me busy lately.

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