Google

Google was one of the companies I really wanted to crack through campus, so getting shortlisted itself felt pretty exciting. The process started with an online coding test. We had around an hour and two coding questions. The questions were around the medium-to-hard level, and I remember spending more time than I should have on the first one. Public on-campus experiences also report two coding questions followed by two technical interviews. After the shortlist, I had two technical rounds. One thing I noticed immediately was that the interviews were almost completely DSA-focused. There weren't random OS, DBMS or OOP questions; the interviewer cared much more about how I approached the problem, explained my thinking and handled follow-ups. This matches several Google campus reports. Round 1:** I was given a graph problem. I started with a straightforward BFS approach, explained the complexity and then the interviewer asked me to optimize it for a larger constraint. I eventually reached the expected approach, but I took longer than I wanted. Round 2:** The question was based on a binary tree/DFS type problem. I could get the basic solution, but the follow-up changed the constraints and I got stuck for a while. Similar Google intern reports mention DFS/BFS and greedy problems, as well as medium-hard DSA with follow-ups. The interviewers were actually quite friendly, which made the rejection a little easier to take. A few days later, I received the rejection mail. Honestly, I wasn't happy with the result, but I realized my weakness wasn't knowing DSA—it was reaching the optimized solution quickly while continuously communicating my thought process. That's what I started working on afterward.