Interviewer - Hi Saaransh!! Pleasure to meet you!! How’s life?

Saaransh - Hello!! Life if going great. I have just returned to campus after having an amazing experience as a Graduate Technical Intern at Intel.

Interviewer - Cool!! Could please answer a few of our questions??

Saaransh - Sure!!

what drew you close to core? Tell us about your role.

Prior to the fourth semester, I was mainly into software and was not into core because till then there wasn’t much exposure to core EE courses.
My interest in core grew in the fourth semester in which we were taught multiple deep EE courses like EE210, ESO203 and EE250. I really enjoyed all of these courses and decided then itself that I will apply for core also.

How did you prepare for this role?

I was preparing simultaneously for software and core. I did resume preparation. I had done a total of 4 projects which included 2 SnT projects,1 Stamatics project and 1 self project, all of which were based on ML. This serves to be very important for any role, because a bad impression is generated when the interviewee is unable to answer a question from a project which is within the scope of the project.

Now, coming to preparation specific to core, I wasn’t biased towards any one of Digital or Analog. I liked them both, so I prepared the subject matter of both. For analog, I revised the analog portion of ESC201 and EE210. For digital, I revised the digital portion of ESC201 and a few portions of EE370 which is taught in our 5th semester. I had asked the respective portions which needed to be studied like memory, HDD and SSD etc from my seniors who had taken up core EE roles in the earlier internship drives. I also studied Verilog from articles on the internet.

For revising these courses, I revised from the course slides which were given to us. I had studied these courses well enough during the regular semesters, so it wasn’t that difficult for me to recall the subject content in these courses. For questions, I referred to online resources for interview and test questions since assignments were not of the same style as the questions asked in the interviews and tests of companies. If I was not able to understand a topic or encounter a new concept then I would look up a Youtube video about the same. It took me a total of 15 days to revise for core.

What was the selection criteria?

There was a direct interview based on CPI criteria. A total of 6 people were shortlisted for the interview.

What happened on D-Day?

I was feeling a little bit low since I was rejected in a couple of companies in their respective final rounds. When I entered the online meeting, I was nervous. The interviewer was very calm and welcoming. He greeted me and asked me to give my introduction. I became very relaxed and answered the questions he posed to me. He asked me very basic questions in analog( like what is a diode, transistor etc ). Then he asked me questions about the projects I did. He asked me to open my Github repository of a project and asked me to explain a few lines of code I wrote. Overall, the interview went very smoothly.

How was the experience there as an intern? What did you work on?

My internship was conducted in the online mode since Covid-19 had not subsided. I had a wonderful experience at my internship. Interestingly, I felt the hierarchy in the company was very flat, in the sense that no one was trying to establish his or her superiority over me on account of seniority in the organization. In fact, everyone was very supportive and helpful. The team in which I was working was developing accelerators for processors. Our processors have reached their maximum limit through the traditional methods that had been adopted earlier. The way ahead is to use ML based accelerators which can enhance the speed of these processors. My role was to make ‘test vectors’ which are like ‘test cases’ for the ML algorithms employed in these accelerators.
There used to be a meeting in the morning in which I was told my task for the day. At night, there was another meeting for reviewing all the work that I had done the entire day. Finally, there was a final PPT which I had to present in front of the entire team.