Goldman Sachs Interview Experience (Summer Internship, OFF-Campus)
Like many other techies out there, Goldman Sachs has been one of my dream companies right from the beginning. I recently gave an interview at Goldman Sachs and got selected for the Summer Internship Program 2021.
The Questions asked in such interviews are not difficult or complicated, they are just meant to check your in-depth knowledge of data structures and algorithms.
Aptitude Test
The application will ask you for your basic details and a resume (which you can update later when needed). Their first assessment was an Aptitude Test which took place on 9th August. It was for a duration of 105 minutes with 68 questions divided as follows:
- Numerical Computations — 8 questions
- Numerical Reasoning — 12 questions
- Comprehension — 10 questions
- Abstract Reasoning — 12 questions
- Diagrammatic Reasoning — 12 questions
- Logical Reasoning — 12 questions
- Subjective — 2 questions
All these MCQ questions had 5 marks for the correct answers and -2 for incorrect. The subjective questions had 10 marks each.
Note: You will not be able to go through and answer all the 68 questions in the given time limit, so be smart in choosing the sections you want to solve first, and think will give you the maximum score. Also, please do not skip the subjective questions as they are easy, general questions with a high score and no negative marking. I was able to solve only 40 questions :)
Technical Test
This round was open for all those who seek to work in Goldman Sachs as a Summer Intern (2021 Batch) or Full-time Engineer (2020 Batch).
A 120-minute online test was conducted on Hackerrank which had the following format:
1st Section :
2 Coding questions(30 minutes)
2nd Section :
10 MCQ questions(30 minutes)
3rd Section :
1 Advanced Programming Question(45 minutes)
4th Section :
2 Subjective Questions(15 minutes)
The Judgement day
My interview was scheduled for the 9th of November on the zoom platform.
Round 1:
My first round took place at around 10 am, and my interviewer was very friendly. She started by introducing himself and asked me to do the same.
I started my introduction and this is a golden chance to take the interview on your side. After my introduction, I found she’s quite interested in my machine learning part and starts asking questions about my NLP work and she was satisfied with all my answers.
Puzzle: There are 100 light bulbs lined up in a row in a long room. Each bulb has its own switch and is currently switched off. The room has an entry door and an exit door. There are 100 people lined up outside the entry door. Each bulb is numbered consecutively from 1 to 100. So is each person.
Person №1 enters the room, switches on every bulb, and exits. Person №2 enters and flips the switch on every second bulb (turning off bulbs 2, 4, 6…). Person №3 enters and flips the switch on every third bulb (changing the state on bulbs 3, 6, 9…). This continues until all 100 people have passed through the room.
How many of the light bulbs are illuminated after the 100th person has passed through the room?
Then she told me to leave the room.
Round 2:
After waiting for more than two hours, I had my second interview.
He shared the CodePair link and start asking DSA questions.
I am unable to remember the exact questions but the First question is from recursion, the Second is from Tree and the last one is from the Graph. Then he moved towards my OOPS concepts and asks
- What is Polymorphism?
- Types of Inheritance with real-world examples
- Why we use abstract classes?
Actually, I am quite confident with my oops concepts and the interviewer has also appreciated my in-depth knowledge. So with this, my second interview was over.
Round 3:
Immediately after my second round I got a call from HR and selected for 3rd round. In this round he asked me one logical question:
Minimum Number of Platforms Required for a Railway/Bus Station
The second one is the puzzle and after this, He asked if I had some questions regarding Goldman Sachs.
After 9 days on the 18th of November, I got the selection mail.
Some generous tips:
- Keep your resume HONEST.
- Don't try to fool the interviewer. If you don't know something then simply ask for the interview to change the topic.
- First Impression matters. So take some time to prepare your introduction as that is the first thing they will hear from you.
Everything you’ll ever need to crack such interviews is already available to the internet and tries to solve the archive of Goldman Sachs from geeks for geeks.
