My First Blog : Microsoft Intern

Without boring you much , I would like to move straight to the topic.Someone said, "He had a habit of writing blogs , so he got selected for the Microsoft Intern." So I decided to better join the League and be more fortunate   next time in any such selection processes.

Well,this is about my first industry interface in College.I study at Indian School of Mines,Dhanbad (yes I am a pseudo-IITian [who qualified JEE but did not get admission in one]) and my Branch is Computer Science and Engineering (the branch exists at ISM since 1998).It was 30th January,2011 and it was our first chance to test the knowledge acquired so far at college.Yes,it was the "Microsoft India Intern Test".I had been waiting for it since last year but preparing for it since only the last month ;).I was quite assured of doing well at it ,I have a fairly decent GPA:8.52 and according to my branch-mates I had good subject knowledge too,though I have never felt it.I had mugged up many algorithms,blogs and used my mental faculties to solve some practice problems since last one month.Having appeared at ACM ICPC Kanpur Regionals this year I was quite assured that my coding skills were upto the mark.

I woke up early on the day of test,had bath,offered my prayers(most of us do remember God when we are in such a situation where "luck" is a key factor) and fully charged up went to the test room.The test comprised of Objective paper of half an hour duration and a Subjective paper of 1 hour duration (it was a subjective test,of course).As soon as I saw the objective paper I pressed the "panic button",I tried some relaxing techniques but  of no help.Well my confidence was decreasing exponentially after I saw that there was +3 marks for right answer and -2 for a wrong answer,(and yes no marks were deducted for unanswered questions,Yippeee).I skipped easy and trivial questions such as inorder traversal of tree etc. and wasted time in calculating number of possible strings generated by a finite-state automata.Still at the end of the test I was able to mark only six answers about which I was quite assured of.So the test was in vain :(.My batch-mates had done quite well in the Objective test.Everything till now had passed like a dream..

I was thinking in my mind ,"Chalo,Subjective to phodh denge"("I will crack the Subjective test with flying colors").Its good to be optimistic isn't it? Then came the Subjective paper ,and yes I knew the first question :)

The second was imcomplete ,well MS guys have a habit of doing so (Everyone has used Windows).Then the third was about searching in a sorted rotated array ,I tried hard to develop the most complex algorithm which was both lengthy and confusing but was highly optimized.I did succeed in doing so ,but the algorithm was not optimized and binary search I had used had some silly mistake :( .I managed to do the fourth question and get a nip at the fifth one.The test was screwed ,all my hopes shattered within few hours.

Well guys,my advice to you is whenever you are in such a situation,don't panic.Though the test results are not out yet ,I am pessimistic about it.Signing off till the test results are declared...