Yesterday I checked my mailbox which I stopped using after I joined USF and to my surprise there was a mail from our beloved Prof (Dr.) James Fawcett from Syracuse University. As far as anyone who has taken his classes, he is the busiest person since his classes are almost full and he is mostly taking 2 courses per semester which involves a lot of programming assignment and thus evaluating them too. But then somebody has rightly said "The busiest man on this planet has time for everything".
So coming back to email thing. He wrote that there are some envelopes (of-course mine) lying over there and asked me to send my resume so that he can write Letter of Recommendation(LOR) for me. The thing is he has already sent me LOR's in May and I sent some envelopes with incorrect stamp value and thus this confusion.
What I really want to emphasize is that he could have easily ignored those envelopes but he contacted me to ask after being in state of confusion, a person with such a stature writing an email to 3 point something student is surprising and at the same time shows humble-ness and genuine-ness of a person. After exchanging couple of emails, he asked me to send my photograph and what I am doing so that he can put into Graduates page but I am so much disappointed on myself that I have nothing much to show as other graduates from his page have (working in Microsoft, Bloomberg, Amazon, Goldman Sachs etc etc) .
Don't know what future holds for me but after meeting Professors like Fawcett Sir, I have gained a lot of respect for academics, teachers and universities in general.
Lots of good wishes for your good health Prof Fawcett.
Showing posts with label NY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NY. Show all posts
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Friday, October 31, 2008
Microsoft SDE interview
Yesterday, I returned from Ithaca, NY(Cornell University). I went there to give Microsoft On-site interview for SDE(Software Design Engineer) position. This was by far the best interview process that I experienced.
Everything happened so fast just within 2 weeks, I cleared preliminary interview over phone which roughly went for 45 minutes.They asked some puzzles, one testing question and one algorithm related question and my projects and previous work experiences.
On Sunday, got an email from Microsoft people stating they have a slot opened on Thursday and I said yes since I don't want to wait a month or two to again visit Redmond headquarters. I was preparing for this interview for last 2 weeks after giving preliminary interview since I knew it went very well and I would be called for on-site interview.
Interview day went like a breeze, only three interviews which consist of one testing and two programming/ algorithm puzzles. In Testing interview, I struggled a lot since I could not assimilate points under sections and I was just giving answers in a very haphazard manner but they were quite right and pertinent to the problem given to me.
Then, 2nd and 3rd interviews were programming, to be specific algorithms related, I impressed interviewers a lot by not only giving more than one solution to the problem but also telling them the algorithm complexities of each one of them in terms of Big-Oh, they were pretty impressed with my conceptual knowledge, I was satisfied since I am convincing people who are Design Engineer Leads at Microsoft for past 12-20 years and graduates of Cornell University(Top 10 Computer Science University in United States). I little bit struggled in writing code, like simulating Hashtable in Java/C# in C++ by constructing a look-up array but somehow managed to make it. After giving these two programming interviews I realized I haven't done any testing on my code and then I realized that I am going to go home empty handed. Testing like empty string and empty array conditions and all.
I was very much satisfied with how my interviews went and was hoping positive outcome. As day passed morning turned to afternoon roughly at 1 PM, one of the managers came to me and he took me to the lobby and told me right now, they won't be selecting me and he was generous enough to give me the feedback, he told the conceptual knowledge of mine was pretty impressive but I suck at testing and in some part I struggled while writing code, they were so right and they are so great they assessed what was in my mind and told me.
Anyway, I am very happy since after this interview I feel so good since I prepared very hard, got many things/concepts cleared and did a lot of problem solving stuff, feels like brain has started working in a very right way :). This was the last time I appeared for Microsoft Interview as a Campus candidate but feeling very gratified with my own personal performance when compared to last on-site interview of Microsoft I gave at Redmond.
Everything happened so fast just within 2 weeks, I cleared preliminary interview over phone which roughly went for 45 minutes.They asked some puzzles, one testing question and one algorithm related question and my projects and previous work experiences.
On Sunday, got an email from Microsoft people stating they have a slot opened on Thursday and I said yes since I don't want to wait a month or two to again visit Redmond headquarters. I was preparing for this interview for last 2 weeks after giving preliminary interview since I knew it went very well and I would be called for on-site interview.
Interview day went like a breeze, only three interviews which consist of one testing and two programming/ algorithm puzzles. In Testing interview, I struggled a lot since I could not assimilate points under sections and I was just giving answers in a very haphazard manner but they were quite right and pertinent to the problem given to me.
Then, 2nd and 3rd interviews were programming, to be specific algorithms related, I impressed interviewers a lot by not only giving more than one solution to the problem but also telling them the algorithm complexities of each one of them in terms of Big-Oh, they were pretty impressed with my conceptual knowledge, I was satisfied since I am convincing people who are Design Engineer Leads at Microsoft for past 12-20 years and graduates of Cornell University(Top 10 Computer Science University in United States). I little bit struggled in writing code, like simulating Hashtable in Java/C# in C++ by constructing a look-up array but somehow managed to make it. After giving these two programming interviews I realized I haven't done any testing on my code and then I realized that I am going to go home empty handed. Testing like empty string and empty array conditions and all.
I was very much satisfied with how my interviews went and was hoping positive outcome. As day passed morning turned to afternoon roughly at 1 PM, one of the managers came to me and he took me to the lobby and told me right now, they won't be selecting me and he was generous enough to give me the feedback, he told the conceptual knowledge of mine was pretty impressive but I suck at testing and in some part I struggled while writing code, they were so right and they are so great they assessed what was in my mind and told me.
Anyway, I am very happy since after this interview I feel so good since I prepared very hard, got many things/concepts cleared and did a lot of problem solving stuff, feels like brain has started working in a very right way :). This was the last time I appeared for Microsoft Interview as a Campus candidate but feeling very gratified with my own personal performance when compared to last on-site interview of Microsoft I gave at Redmond.
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