Its a rare moment of joy and elation when you bag the first job on campus. Call it the fruits of labor or a mere serendipity, I got a job on Day 0 and its beyond words to describe how euphoric I felt then. I got placed as an ASIC Designer at nVIDIA graphics on August 19.I know its kind of late to put this post now; nevertheless I feel if I recount my experiences, it might provide fruitful insights to the juniors.
We had a 1 hour subjective paper comprising of about 11 questions.The questions pertained to digital design, Timing Diagrams, Clock Skew, power consumption in VLSI chips, C program (linked-list), Verilog code, Pipelining, CMOS digital circuits, data compression/encryption. I attempted 10 of the 11 questions and was expecting to get through. We got our results at about midnight.11 people were selected for the interview next morning and I scraped through !
The next morning,I was the first one to be interviewed at 8 am. The Romans believe ,’“God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God .” So before 8 am, I was praying to God trying to convince Him that how pious a devotee I am.And being an Indian,I did try to ‘bribe’ God with promises of various offerings!!
I was a bit edgy but the interviewer was friendly and we were soon hitting it off! He asked about what I felt of the questions in the subjective paper. I told him that the questions were tricky and good but I had gone through the previous years nvidia papers and this was surpisingly different.I had expected more questions from state diagrams. I was frank and he liked it. It shows you have done you home-work well and are really interested in joining the company.
I was then asked a question on computer architecture (memory pool) . Well in BITS, Electronics people dont do Computer Architecture. And whoa…my first question on a subject I have not done! Was the ‘bribe’ not enough, God? I was struck with fidgety; my damn brains freezed and I said frankly,”Sorry sir but we EEE guys dont have Computer Architecture in our syllabus”. And I must say it did pull off. Some of my friends who were posed the same question tried to answer whatever they felt might be correct. Unfortunately for them, the interviewers only dug deeper into Computer Architecture posing questions on whatever you answer.To put in other words, if I tried answering that question,I would have put myself in deep shit! Its okay to accept that your knowledge on a subject is shallow because you have not done that course.Its always good to portrait a true picture rather than waiting for the interviewer to strip you down and expose your weakness.Lead the interviewer to your strengths.Thats the way.
The next part was something I liked. He explained me some concepts of temporal locality which I have not learnt. I then confronted two questions which I was to answer based on what he had explained! I answered both of them correctly. I loved this part.They were looking for how fast you can grasp things.
Learn from your mistakes. I felt that nvidia guys were staunch supporters of this notion! My interviewer took out my answer-sheet. I had made mistakes in 2 questions in the previous days’ subjective paper and I was told to rectify them. He was giving hints all the way and I could fix both the answers. Then he went through my resume. My projects were based on FPGA implementation and communication.He put questions about difference between FPGA and ASIC, and some questions on CDMA, data encryption/compression algorithms.
Finally he winded up with 2 HR questions.’Why do you want to join nvidia?’ I divulged how I developed an interest in electronics in my school and then specifically VLSI after coming to BITS and how my interest resonates with the work going on in nvidia.The next was expected.’You got a high CG.Why dont you go for MS?’ Now this is a tricky question. I have read in various sites how to go about this question. All of them suggests you say that you got financial constraints. But I dint go by this because I felt that the interviewers must have got this answer everywhere they went and can clearly see through it. So I told him that I firmly believe classroom teaching can never be as effective as practical experience where you struggle yourself and learn.I gave him one or two examples to buttress what I had said.
Finally every interviewer will ask you if you got any doubt or question about their company. Its always best to put forth a question because that shows you are real serious about the job. For this, one must attend the ppt and go through the company website before the interview.
My interview lasted about half an hour. After that you can feel time freezing. The results were to be out at about noon.I kept walking up and down the wing corridor tensed. Every minute seemed an eternity. I increased my ‘bribe’ value. I think that day, the link to God must have been jammed by my traffic of prayers. At 11:40am the results were out. 6 people made through and after that I was literally on cloud nine.The good Lord did respond!
Last but not the least, I must say that Lady Fate does play a big part in any interview. Sometimes one may fail in an interview. That just means its not your day. Maybe Destiny has better plans for you. So even if you dont get through ,never be disheartened. Every interview provides you with valuable insights about how you can perform better in the next one.Pray to God and success is soon to come your way.
All the best !
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