There were 5 rounds , briefly :

Start : 28th June , 2023
1st : Coding Round - For Hackathon
2nd : Coding Round - For Interview
3rd : Techinical Round
4th : Managerial Round
5th : HR Round
End : October 15 , 2023

-------------------------------------- Coding round --------------------------------------
28th June , 2023
It is a coding round for the hackathon that Cisco was conducted called Code with Cisco Codeathon and we had to give it as a team , and so me , abhishek Ranjan and Vedant Singh made a team , and it was summer , we were at our homes , and luckily only one had to give the contest like ICPC , other 2 can help throught a gMeet which was also monitored if we are not together .
The first question was easy and was on simple implementation as per I remember , and the 2nd one was DP , and abhishek could give the answer almost immediately , and now we were stuck with the 3rd question , and a lot of time was there , we tried , but couldnt complete it , and it is a ND DP question !
(N=3 we thought..as per the paramenters later..so it was a bit tough for us at that time !)

We were waiting for the result , and very less could solve the 3rd question but enough solved the 2nd question such that we were sure that 2nd question cant be a qualifying question .
And ofcourse , we werent selected for the Codeathon .

-------------------------------------- Coding Round 2 --------------------------------------
2nd September , 2023
Total Selects : 27 (9 teams) To our surprise , Cisco has still selected some teams from our college to take part in another coding round which was to be given individually , which could give us an opportunity to get an interview .
The coding Round was scheduled on 4th Sep , and it had :
Section 1 : Computer application based theoretical questions : 50
Section 2 : Coding questions : 2
I did my best for the theoretical part , but the main part here was the time management , which i didnt think of seriously , and ended up solving 1st question fully but couldnt pass all testcases for the 2nd question .
I was not sure about the interview call , as after the exam i came to know that this 2nd question was a previous question and that too from Cisco itself 2 years ago!!
But luckily i was selected from the total of 12 out of 27 , and abhishek was selected too ! (Vedant has already cracked Wells Fargo , so he didnt give this test)

-------------------------------------- Technical Round --------------------------------------
26th September , 2023
Total Selects : 12
The interviews were Pool Campus , that means , Along with our campus (12) , there were few other NIT's , IIT's , IIIT's which also have with the same panelists .
And let me tell you clearly about the CV we have for the Interview , its quite unique and maybe no other company does this , but none of our personal data should be kept in our CV , that means , not our name , address , college , CGPA , Department , not even projects or clubs if they are specific to a singular college !
And We also were to only keep just what we did in projects if we had any , and achievements if any and the courses that we liked or completed in CV and each of us were given an ID , mine was CC248 , and we were called and represented by the same ID throughout .
They made this so that we wont be discriminated based on collge / CGPA / Department , just our Technical skills were qestioned ...which was great ! (till a tragedy at HR round)
So the round was around 60 mins , my Interviewer divided it into 3 sections ,
Section 1 : Course based
He asked out of the said courses what i liked the most , and as per my interest i told , it was Theory of Computation (4th Sem) and Compiler Design(5th Sem Ongoing) , then he started asking on why and how it can help represent the programming relation between the hardware and software , Like TOC is nothing but a real life graph that brings up all possible decisions and checks for success .. and then came the harder ones from Compiler Design , he asked about all the stages amd asked to explain , i could remember some ..Other i told i dont know the name exactly but i can tell the working and he was satisfied enought with the understanding until he asked deeply on implmentation and if i knew how to code for its design and i was completely blank and suprised that how could he even think that i may know how to design a compiler or part of a compiler ..then he moved to OS and asked basic questions like the states and what is happening and why we need OS and then semaphores and he quickly moved to the next Section , most of the time was consumed by Compilers for me !
Section 2 : Project based
He told that he was interested in one project that i did under Asst. Prof. Sujoy sir and Prof. Nilanjan sir , which was based on classifyong datasets regarding Lip Reading and how i was fitting the image fraes and what all ideas and problems i faced , for which i was a bit nervous a bit as it was almost an year and i didnt expect that i had to explain completely , but as i started i could feel and remember all the issues that were pointed out in the endless meetings we had and our solutions and the models and he ended with in reference to the google and other models for the same how were we different , which was the end of this section (I told the last question as i feel it is commonly asked on whatever project yoou do which is already there in the market , you have to have a reason on why you worked on something that is already available and what you made better !)
Section 3 : Coding Based i was ready to solve the questions and pumped up with all the confidence that we gained by giving so many contests , but the question he asked was not based on DSA , but it was based on How i wonld optimize the code not wrt Time complexity or Space Complexity , but wrt how the hardware implementation would differ according to simple code lines , for example , if we are adding two strings like String val= str1 + str2 , then it would actually not add the char wise to save space that one String can take , rather have connecting pointers..if that makes sense..so i had to tell i could have used a char array and use some end char to represent my end of the array just like C . .so on..
With this ,, my TR 1 ended , i was confident enough in the start , till i started evaluating all the sections and there were some points that i didnt do so well in theory and also in project based , so was waiting , and i was selected and it was a total of 7 out of 12 , which is scheduled on 29th September

-------------------------------------- Managerial Round --------------------------------------
29th September , 2023 Total selects : 7 This round was purely based on Projects and he even asked to show the codes and asked some of the codes too , I could luckily frame it in the way i wanted , and paved it towards Android Dev in java , which i was doing at that time , and this is very important as generally you do many projects and you might have done some dev like 6 months ago or sometimes even a year ago , and you may not be able to code and impress enough , so if you could take it to what you are working on presently , it will be a huge advantage .
And i was already explaining our plan which was a startup which me and Azad Mosarof , have worked day and night for the whole summer and he has helped me a lot to get better too , he is like an expert in any Dev ! We could even set it up on Playstore and though i didnt have time to share the link as at that time it was in internal testing in play store and he said he would try it after it endded and appreciated for what we took to solve and then moved onto some non technical things like what else i do like clubs and all , and i had enough to tell from Teching at Recursion to Playing for InterNIT Tennis , and from TPR duties to Project meets ! And he almost told that you will have the next round and dont stop playing at any cost in bangalore , he like my daily routines so mch that he felt like i already made it ! I too was satisfied .
Immediately there were calls for the final HR round on the same day , going on parallel with the Managerial round , and here many were being eliminated !

-------------------------------------- HR Round --------------------------------------
Total Selects : 4 4 were selected out of 7 and it was Me , Abhiskek Ranjan , Saptarshi Ghosh and Murali and HR round was just for providing some information like the Stipend and Location and type of work , he asked few questions like my Jee ranks and what were my hobbies and thats all . it was hardly 5 - 7 mins He also informed that its not that who ever came to this round are selected , there will still be segregation done and we will be mailed regarding the same in a weeks time .

It took almost 2 weeks finally on 11th October they announced the result and only me and abhishek could make it through , and as per the tragedy i told of the CV , we think that Saptarshi and Murali were not selected because thye were from EE and ECE , and we both were from CSE , which also brought a bit sadness as after going through those many rounds and being informed about the stipend and work details , noone can expect a rejection .

Anyway , finally it ended and i owe it to my mother , Professors and very importantly my Club seniors and mates , who always pushed on contests and now we naturally like them and got the feeling of rush rather than boredom while coding !

Note : It can be hard and sometimes demotivation , even i had rejections , and somethings like only Girl recruitment or 9+ CG cant be fixed , just go on with that , and a good opportunity will always come at some point of time , but dont stop after getting that opportunity , its a way to encourage you to improve more , not sit and enjoy !

It was long , but it was all felt .. and hope it will be useful .

  PRANEETH_DUTTA edited this page on Dec. 22, 2023, 11:02 a.m. Approved