Morgan Stanley Interview Experience for Technology Apprenticeship

The general flow of Morgan Stanley's on-campus recruitment included these stages:

1. Online Assessment
2. Round-1 Interview (Technical)
3. Round-2 Interview (Technical + Behavioural)

Online Assessment

• It took place in campus premises and every student had to attend the online test in college lab systems.
• The test was conducted on the SHL platform.
• It consisted of 3 sections:
  • Debugging: Consists of 7 debugging questions in the language of your choice. Need to identify and correct syntactical and logical errors in the code.
  • General Aptitude: Around 25-30 questions on aptitude. Doesn't allow revisiting of questions. Following link can be used to practice this section https://www.shl.com/shldirect/en/practice-tests
  • DSA: Consists of 3 questions. In our case there were:
    • A question based around LFU cache
    • A string based question using sliding window to basically count no. of substrings which satisfy the given condition
    • Can't recall what it was but definitely easier than the above 2

Round-1 Interview (Technical) [May 23rd]

• It was held online on a zoom call.

• On average it lasts for 1 hr - 1.5 hrs.

• The topics expected are Core subjects i.e OS, DBMS and OOPS, Project and resume related questions and DSA problems

• I began with a brief and clear introduction.

• My interviewee started with OOPS. He went on to ask

  • The definition of OOPS
  • What is its significance in real life
  • What other programming paradigms are present and in what scenarios is OOPS preferred over those paradigms
  • What are the 4 pillars of OOPS
  • Asked me to implement and give an example for all 4 pillars on a code editor of my choice
  • I was given freedom in the choice of my language i.e Java or C++. While some others were asked to specifically code in Java.

• Then moving on to OS he asked very basic questions and it was a pretty short section

  • Asked me what practices would I use to optimize the process of reading from a very huge file and asked me follow up questions based on my answers.
  • He also asked what OS I use and why i prefer using Linux over Windows

• Then moved on to my projects. He asked basic questions on my Tech stack and some questions on why I chose 'X' tool or technique over an alternative 'Y' tool or technique

• Also went on to ask DBMS questions

  • On what basis must one decide whether to use SQL or NoSQL databases.
  • Give example scenarios where each type would fare better than the other.
  • ACID properties, Indexing, Sharding were also discussed

• The interview had already lasted for about 45-50 mins. He then went on to ask a DSA question which was very similar to the "Add Two Numbers" question from Leetcode. The input format was completely up to me i.e whether to use string, vector or any other format to represent the number. Only change being that I had to accommodate negative number inputs as well. Once again no restriction on the programming language

Round-2 Interview (Technical + Behavioural) [June 18th]

• This round was also on a zoom call.

• Expected it to be completely HR and behavioural round but was asked a few technical questions.

• I started off with my introduction.

• I was then asked to solve the Maximum Sum Subarray question.

• Then he asked what data structure would I use to implement the Undo-Redo functionality in an application.

• Also asked me real life use cases of Linked lists & Doubly Linked lists

• From then on it was completely HR mode

• He asked me about my interests and hobbies.

• Also about any extracurricular activities I have been a part of.

• He also questioned my role and the activities I perform in a club.

• Was asked various scenario based questions like:

  • How would I handle conflict in the club?
  • How do you divide roles and responsibilities in the club?
  • Do you prefer to work individually or in a team?
  • What issues have you faced in the club and how have you resolved it?
  • What do you do if something you were responsible for didn't go as planned during a club event?

• Also other questions like:

  • What role did you have during your internship?
  • How did we report on the progress of our tasks to the ones in charge?
  • What are the responsibilities of a developer in a client meeting?
  • How to make sure your presence is masked by others in your team?
  • Why did you choose Morgan Stanley?
  • To which core principle of Morgan Stanley do you feel more related to?
  • What are my viewpoints on pursuing education far away from my hometown?
  • How would you cope if you were asked to switch to Java.

The results were announced on 8th of July and I was one among the selected 😁