Mastercard

I appeared for the Software Engineer Intern recruitment process at Mastercard through my college. The process started with an online assessment, and honestly, the OA was quite rough compared to what I had expected. The coding section had DSA-based questions, and one of the problems was based on graphs. The graph question took up a significant amount of my time because I initially tried to approach it using a familiar traversal technique, but after going through the constraints again, I realized that my first approach wasn't going to be sufficient. I had to rethink the solution and work through the graph structure carefully. The remaining questions were also time-sensitive, so the OA ended up being more stressful than I had anticipated. After the assessment, I was shortlisted for the interview process. The plan was to have three technical rounds, with each round scheduled for around one hour. The interviews were primarily focused on DSA and problem-solving, with some discussion around projects. Unfortunately, my journey ended in the first technical round itself. The first round started with a brief introduction and then moved directly into coding. I was given a DSA problem and was asked to explain my approach before writing the code. I started with a straightforward solution and then tried to optimize it based on the constraints. The interviewer kept asking follow-up questions and changed a few conditions in the problem, which made the discussion more challenging. I was able to understand the problem and reach a reasonable approach, but I struggled while converting the complete idea into clean, working code. I also spent more time than I should have debugging one part of my implementation. The interviewer asked about the complexity and possible optimizations, and I could explain most of the reasoning, but I wasn't able to finish the problem as confidently as I wanted. There was also a short discussion about one of my projects. The interviewer asked about the architecture, why I had chosen particular technologies, and what exactly I had implemented myself. That part went relatively smoothly, but the coding portion was clearly where most of the time went. After the round, I was informed that I would not be progressing further in the process. So although the recruitment process had three planned technical rounds, I only attended the first one. The second and third rounds never happened for me. The overall flow was therefore: Application → Online Assessment → Technical Round 1 → Rejected The Mastercard process was a good reminder that even when the interview problem looks familiar, the ability to implement the solution quickly and handle follow-ups matters just as much as knowing the underlying DSA concept. The OA had already been challenging, especially the graph problem, and the first interview continued with a similar emphasis on actual problem-solving rather than simply recalling standard algorithms. I was obviously disappointed with the result, especially after clearing the OA and reaching the interview stage. Still, the experience helped me identify a few areas I needed to work on — particularly graph problems, implementation speed, debugging under pressure, and being able to adapt my solution when the interviewer changes the constraints. Overall, Mastercard had three technical rounds planned, each around one hour, but I was eliminated after the first technical round and did not get the opportunity to attend the remaining two.