Greetings to all, I am Jay Gorakhiya and this blog is about my MS Interview experience. Below is my GATE result details
Rank : 229
Score: 757
Category : GEN
In the previous blog I had shared my iit madras interview experience. In this blog I am going to share my MS selection process experience for IIT Bombay.
IIT Bombay had one online test followed by interview. students were shortlisted for online test based on the GATE score. For the online test students were supposed to select a stream of interest out of Computer Systems, Intelligent Systems and Theoretical Computer Science. Each stream had different panels.
Panels in Computing Systems (CS) Stream
- Software Engineering, Compilers, Programming Languages (Section 1)
- Systems Software (Section 2)
- Hardware and Security (Section 3)
Panels in Intelligent Systems (IS) Stream
- AI/ML (NLP, Speech, Text) (Section 4)
- AI/ML (Representation, Learning, Agents) (Section 5)
- Visual Computing (Section 6)
Panels in Theoretical Systems (TS) Stream
- Algorithms, Complexity, Cryptography (Section 7)
- Formal methods (Section 8)
A google form was circulated to select the stream of preference for the test and we also had to select one project for RAP(research assistant through project) position. project we had to select must be from the panel within the stream we had selected. The test consisted of 8 sections from different streams, as mentioned above, and a student had to attempt questions in any panel from their selected stream. Marks for questions attempted out of the selected stream were not considered.
The test was 3 hours long and consisted of MCQs, Fill in the Blanks, Numerical Answer Type, One Word Answer type questions with no negative marking. The level of questions was at par with GATE, not so much higher than that, atleast for computer systems stream as i had attempted it. Below are some topics from where questions where asked (some topics might be missing as the list is memory based):
- C programming ; Pointers, Functions etc
- Software Enginnering Principles
- Operating Systems ; Synchronization, Threads and Processes etc
- DBMS ; Functional Dependencies, SQL etc
- Computer Networks ; Flow Control, IP, etc
- Computer Organisation ; Memory Heirarchy, Cache Memory, Pipeline etc
The exact procedure, syllabus and resources to study were mentioned in the website and were conveyed to us via zoom meeting. For M.S. students, the mark (out of 100) was the sum of the GATE score (normalised to 70) and test score (normalised to 30) for the chosen stream. The qualifying mark (out of 100) for the general category was 55.
The test results were announced on that night only, and my name was there on the shortlist made for MS(TA) interview and MS (RAP) interview as well for the project i had selected. The exact time and date for the interview were shared to us via email.
================================= MS (RAP) Interview ==================================
I had selected Computer Architecture projects under Prof. Biswabandan Panda. I had selected this project because of 2 main reasons, one that i didn’t have much knowledge about other AI/ML projects, though a brief about every project was made during a zoom meeting but for RAP position the prof. always wants the student to have some prior knowledge and more importantly interest in the project field, and other reason was that my first priority was Mtech and not MS. There were 2 projects under Biswa sir; processor performance & security and generic & domain specific hardware prefetching.
In the interview, sir didn’t ask much. The interview was about 10 minutes only.
Q1. What do you know about the project? Do you have any experience in it?
Q2. What is Bandwidth, throughput, Latency? Differences between them
(This was the only technical question he asked)
Q3. Have you worked in any project before and How much lines of code have you written?
(I told about my ISRO internship project and its code was about 500 lines)
Q4. How much are you interested in this position? what is your priority MTech or MS?
My answer to last question was Mtech and i thought that question was asked to every student so that the position is given to student whose first priority was MS. Finally, I was not selected for MS (RAP).
================================== MS (TA) Interview ==================================
For MS(TA) interview there were 3 professors, all 3 of them asked questions of different subjects. Firstly they asked about my gate result details like rank and score then they started asking questions:
P1 : you have selected computer systems, what subjects are you interested in??
Me: mostly OS and somewhat COA.
Prof. P1 asked me questions from COA only:
1.What do you know about Cache Memories?
2.What are the types of conflicts?
3.Tell a code snippet which will result in more cold misses? and which type of cache causes more cold misses? etc
Prof. P2 asked me questions from OS only:
1.What is process synchronization?
2.What are different synchronization mechanisms?
3.What is dining philosophers problem and what are its different solution?
4.What is reader writers problem and how do you solve it? etc
Prof. P3 asked me questions from CN only:
1.What is CSMA/CD protocol?
2.How is collision detected in CSMA/CD?
3.(Asked me some probability related question in CSMA/CD, avg number of transmissions before no collision etc)
They were cross questioning me a lot, I think i became quite nervous. I have listed down most of the questions i remembered. Finally, I was selected for MS(TA) porgramme at IIT Bombay. This was my IIT B MS interview experience. Hope it helps you in your interviews. All the best, believe in yourself and keep calm, they will ask from gate syllabus only, not some new things. Just revise the subject of choice and all will be okay. ALL THE BEST.
