Intel

Role: Graduate Intern

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: 23 July 2025

Interview Type: On-Campus, Internship

Result: Selected

Difficulty: Easy to Medium

Rounds: 1 round

Topics Asked: Research publication, Big Data Security, C++ Project (Data Structures: Array, Linked List, Hashing), Operating Systems (Process Scheduling, Round Robin, Time Slice, Semaphore, Mutex, Interrupts, Deadlock, Paging), Coding (Remove Duplicates From A Given String, C-linked-list-node-creation-function, Program For Inserting A Node In A Linked List, Detect loop in a linked list)

Experience:

This interview experience for a Graduate Intern position was an on-campus event. Out of approximately 35 students, only 6 were shortlisted for the interview, and the author was one of the five remaining candidates after one was placed at another company.

The single interview round lasted 1.5 hours. It began with a self-introduction, followed by questions related to the candidate's research publication, which was on big data security. Specific questions included "you have published an implementation paper or review paper ??" and then delving into security topics like "What is SQL Injection? What is Buffer overflow? How to prevent our system from these types of attacks?".

The interview was then divided into three phases: MTech Project, Operating System, and Coding. For the MTech project (15-20 min), which was a C++ Bus passenger ticket system, the interviewer asked about the data structures used (Array and Linked List) and better alternatives like Hashing for O(1) time complexity.

The Operating Systems section (40-45 min) was extensive, covering almost every concept from process scheduling to memory management. Questions included: What are Process Scheduling and different scheduling techniques? What is Round Robin Scheduling? What is Time Slice (Time Quantum)? What factors influence time quantum size? What is Semaphore? Difference between semaphore and mutex? What are interrupts and their types? What is Deadlock? How Paging Works? Difference Between Paging and Segmentation?

The coding part (25-30 min) was considered easy, with interviewers being supportive and providing hints when the candidate got stuck. Specific coding questions included: Remove Duplicates From A Given String, C-linked-list-node-creation-function, Program For Inserting A Node In A Linked List, and Detect loop in a linked list. Theoretical questions related to coding like "What is Node *next in the given code below ?" were also asked.

The overall result was positive, with Intel selecting 2 students, and the author being one of them.