Morgan Stanley Internship Interview Process Details and Preparation Guidance

I had a goal. Morgan Stanley is a prominent company that visits my campus(VJTI) and I was inspired by my seniors to aim and try my best for Morgan Stanley. This dream did come true on 31st August 2020.

So yes this was an on-campus opportunity for me and the description of the round is described in detail in this article. Assessment Round followed by 2 Interview Rounds. At the end of my interview experience, I have shared some insights on what can be a good strategy for preparing!

ASSESSMENT ROUND

The first round was the online assessment held on the AMCAT platform.

It consisted of 3 sections

1. Aptitude (20 mins)

General aptitude and logical questions were asked. Questions based on Probability, PnC, and statistics.

2. Debugging (20 mins)

7 questions were asked and we had to select the programming language of our choice(C/C++/Java). Code with logical and syntax errors was given and we had to debug the code to get the desired output.

3. Programming questions (1 hour)

There were 3 coding questions of moderate difficulty. (All questions had some story related to them. I am directly writing the coding problem related to the story)

A. Given an array of integers of length N. Find indices of two elements A[i] and A[j] such that

j>i and A[j]<A[i] and (j-i) should be maximum possible.

B. Given N integers find the first K integers having a maximum number of 1’s in their binary representation.

C. This was some problem related to batch OS. Given N processes and their priorities, and how the processes are interdependent. We had to process all the interdependent processes together(in the form of a batch). Priority of the batch is equal to the sum of all the processes present in it. We have to find the batch with maximum priority. This was all about the online round, out of approximately 180 people on my campus, 24 people were shortlisted for the next round.

Interview Round 1

Started with my introduction. But he asked me to describe my projects also in my introduction. So the introduction I had prepared had to change at that second.

Then he started with my project discussion. He asked me to describe my projects and focussed more on the usage of database and why did a choose to use a NoSQL database, what if I chose a SQL database and comparison between the two.

Then he asked me to rate myself on any programming language I knew

I told C++. He asked me the difference between a pointer and a reference and told me to show how memory is allocated. I wrote the representation on the doc and explained it to him. Then he told me to find the size of the pointer. I told him that the size of any pointer is of the size int. So he confused me saying what if the pointer is pointing to an object. What will its size be then? I still told the size of the int(which is correct!)

Then he asked the size of the reference. I told him that I don’t have exactly an idea of this but stating a few points I concluded that it should also be of the same as a pointer.

He asked me the difference between static and dynamic memory allocation and told me to show this with an example. A few follow-ups on that.

Then he told me to describe a binary search tree. Find the first occurrence of a number in BST. I solved the question by explaining to him all the edge cases. Before starting coding he asked me the time complexity. Then I drew an example myself and started explaining him and also cross-checked my code many times. He then asked me the space complexity to which I said o(1) then he asked what about stack space so then I told if considering that then maximum o(logN)

Then went into the worst-case complexity of O(N) to O(NlogN). How to improve it. I told if the tree is skewed then O(N) and it can be improved via AVL and defined what is AVL. Then he asked for other examples of balancing BST’S.

The next question was to find the k most frequent strings

Given that v={“abc”,”def”,”abc”,”def”,”deg”} and k=2

To find the k most frequent

So we have to return abc, def.

I had used a map+priority queue inserting all the elements in my priority queue. I optimized my solution further saying I will just put only k strings

Various Tradeoffs, complete code, and space and time Complexity were asked of both the solutions I gave.

Interview Round 2

Pro-fit Round.

Various questions related to

1. Where do you stand in college?
2. What do you lack?
3. What you see in yourself that others don’t have and vice versa
4. Do I prefer python or C + +? Am I interested in the idea of StartUps?
5. Who is my role model

And Follow-ups on what we answer.

The next part of the interview was to Design book my show, a proper low-level system design question

This round went for about 1.5 hours.

Finally, results were announced after 5 hours and with a prank group discussion round, 8 of us were selected.

Preparation Tips

1. Prepare your introduction well
2. Read GFG articles of past experiences.
3. OS, DBMS, OOPS Concepts, Java/C++ Theory ~GFG Last Minute Notes
4. OOP Low-level design https://crack-oop-system-design.herokuapp.com/
5. DSA problem-solving https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/must-do-coding-questions-for-companies-like-amazon-microsoft-adobe/
6. Data Structures knowledge, sorting algorithms, time and space complexity calculations
7. Your projects description, tech stack should be well versed, why did you choose a particular tech stack, what was the aim behind the project, what can be a future scope of this project, what are the features in the project, your role in the project.
8. Keep yourself well hydrated, don’t lose confidence, structure a proper plan which areas you want to focus on, check your internet connection, your HR round answers should be honest and from your experience, try practicing a few examples and keep them handy, give reference to these examples, while describing your HR round answers.

If you have any further queries, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/palak-mantry/

All the best. Let’s trust our preparation and all we can do is give our best! 🤗