Again IISC.. MSc (Engg)

After a long month it was again time to roam around a bit with the excuse of interview. By God’s grace, I got interview calls for MSc (Engg) from both the departments, CSA and SERC in IISc. Former through JEST and later through GATE.

First, it was CSA on 5th of this June. I was pretty sure that I wont clear the written paper like last time, the SERC M Tech exam. Actually, I was so sure that I would not clear the written and hence would not get the chance of appearing for interview, that I didn’t prepare at all for the interview. And there was subjects like Discrete Math, Linear algebra, Probability for interview.

The subjects for interview are in accordance with the research interests you select, like I selected mostly from intelligent systems, machine learning, pattern recognition and got those subjects for interview. They send a interview note,via email, before hand, so that candidates can select there area of research interest and prepare the subjects for interview accordingly.

Now this time,with all my surprise the paper was easy and they gave enough time to finish it. There were 10 question for 30 minutes. As they said, it was for warm up,

1. How many number <100 has odd number of factors?
2. Uniform distribution, P(X>0.3)?
3. Rank of a matrix, a (i,j)=0 ,if i+j odd, else 1
4. Difference between Divide n Conquer and Dynamic Programming
5. Recurrence relation and worst case time complexity of Merge sort

Rest was also easy, n I dont remember them  🙂

With in few minutes they called everyone (I guess everyone was called) for interview in three panels. And I was taken upstairs directly into the interview room. Profs were smiling n I kept saying myself, “am I going to make a big fool of myself?” I think this is something you should never do. You should always go for the interview with a confident face, confident mind. Anyways, it stared with Discrete Math followed by Linear algebra, followed Probability.

1. Define relation and function
2. Difference between them
3. Cross product of a set
4. Write definition of reflexive, symmetric, equivalence relation in mathematical expression
5.  Number of symmetric relation

6. Eigen values, define, write n mathematical expression

7. Define random variable

I was so very struggling for most of the answers, specially the definitions, that they finally asked me about a subject choice and again I said Data Structure and Algo.

8. What is min heap
9. Build one from an array
10. How heap sort works using min heap

Finally they let me go.