The campus recruitment drive at our college in September 2014 was conducted by Nvidia Pune. The profile offered was that of a QA developer, and the package was the best the college had seen to date.

The criteria for selection was 65%, and I was one of the fortunate few to clear it by a margin of 0.95%.

The recruitment procedure was straightforward, beginning with an initial offline MCQ test for candidate screening.

(Pro tip: The aptitude test, besides quantitative questions, included technical questions on C, C++, Data Structures, and Operating Systems. Do not prepare only for quantitative sections, as they had minor weightage.)

Out of approximately 234 candidates, 38 were selected for two technical rounds and one HR round.

Typically, core companies conduct long and extensive interviews. As expected, my first technical round lasted about 1.5 hours. I was required to write code on paper and then dry-run it, handling every single exceptional case for the given problem statement. For most of the 1.5 hours, I was scribbling code onto paper, and the interviewer patiently encouraged me to write each step. There were times when I panicked and wrote spaghetti code, but the interviewer was satisfied upon hearing my explanation of the code (so I had that going for me, which was nice). After this interview, I thought I might be spared the second round, but I was called for it immediately, half an hour later.

My second technical round was conducted by a very senior developer who had been present during the company's presentation that morning. I was a bit nervous, but fortunately, it was quite easy. Basic Operating Systems questions were thrown at me in a rapid-fire style, which I answered mostly to his satisfaction. A small puzzle regarding maps was asked, although I'm not sure if I provided a completely working solution. The fear of rejection loomed after this interview was completed.

By 7:30 PM, the results for the technical interviews were declared, and only 4 candidates were asked to proceed to the HR round. I smiled when I heard my name among these four, but that smile vanished during the ten minutes I was being interviewed. HR is particularly a weak area for me, but I survived it decently, answering all questions with confidence in my tone. A short while later, the results were declared, and I was officially hired by Nvidia! :)

A point worth mentioning here: After the names of the selected students were announced, we were asked to consider whether to accept the job offer. The developers were present to clear any doubts we had and were more than willing to give us a few days to confirm our approval. I don't know about other companies, but it's obvious here how much importance Nvidia gives to its employees and their decisions.

Explain how you will apply merge sort for a given n-node binary tree.

Write a procedure to delete a node from a circular singly linked list. Handle each and every case.

1. Draw an entity diagram for a many-to-many relationship. Explain each of the notations used (obviously, here we are expected to use as many notations as possible).