My experience of Ph.D. interview (CSE) at NIT Arunachal Pradesh

Hi there !

Hope you are doing well. Amid pandemic and lockdown due to COVID-19 outbreak, I completed my B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering this year 2020. In this article, I'm going to share my experience of Ph.D. interview at National Institute of Technology, Arunachal Pradesh.

NIT Arunachal Pradesh (Source : Google Images)

Application process

NIT Arunachal Pradesh accepts application for Ph.D. course under three categories - Full time, Part time and Self sponsored category. At the beginning, the minimum eligibility criteria for applying was M.Tech. followed by B.Tech. in the relevant field with an aggregate of 60% marks or 6.5 CGPA out of 10 in each. But later, they announced that B.Tech. (only) candidates can also apply for the same (Direct Ph.D.) with the same eligibility marks.

In the Full time category, you will be given Institution Fellowship but for applying under this category, you need to have a valid GATE score. For the Non-GATE candidates, they have to apply under Self-sponsored category. For the advertisement, you need to keep visiting the institute website.

Selection procedure

An online examination was conducted for the shortlisted candidates. The questions were of type MCQ and were mainly from the subjects like Operating Systems, C, Data Structures, Networking, DBMS and Automata Theory. The examination was of 20 minutes and the total questions were around 15. After 2 days of the examination, the personal interview was conducted.

Among all the applicants, total 25 applicants were shortlisted for the Online test and Interview. Candidates were not further shortlisted after the online test. All had to appear for Online test as well as Personal Interview.

Interview experience

The interview was conducted over Google Meet and all the departmental professors were present. I was given a slot after 2 pm. They sent me an email consisting of the Google Meet room link and and also called me over phone just before the interview. I joined and they asked me to give a brief introduction of myself. Well, in my opinion, I would suggest you not to give the same intro that you gave for a company in the technical or HR round. Here, mainly they would like to know your academic background, marks, research experience (if any) etc. I mentioned my latest CGPA, Internship Project, Final Year Project, Pre-final year Mini Project and the conference paper I published.

Before asking me questions related to my domain/stream, the professors asked me if I have already applied to any other institution for course. I gave my honest answer saying No, because at that point of time, I didn't apply for any other institution. This was followed by the main interview.

I was mainly asked questions by HoD sir of CSE department and few questions from other professors. They didn't ask me the subject name(s) I'm comfortable in (again, it's different from technical round) rather they asked questions from the domain(s) I have worked on (in my project). So, my questions were mainly from Cryptography, Data security, Convolutional Neural Networks, Information retrieval topics such as tokenization, retrieval models, ranking etc. I answered all of them from best of my knowledge. Again, they didn't ask me about what I did in my projects. I was interviewed for 20-25 minutes.

After the mandatory subject questions, they started asking questions like why I want to pursue Ph.D. after B.Tech., why I've chosen NIT Arunachal Pradesh etc. My hobby is travelling and I love to see and contribute images on Google Maps. So I had enough knowledge on where the institution is located, how to reach there. This added an extra layer of impression on them when they asked me the above questions. One of them asked me if I have visited North-East part of India. I told them about my one-week tour to Assam and Meghalaya. I was asked two more questions. The first one was if I have stayed in a hostel in my college days or not because I (obviously) have to stay in the hostel. The last one was from an Associate Professor who asked me if I am asked to join after one month, will I be able to join that or not. And after this question, I got my answer (atleast I became 80% sure) how I performed in the interview and if they are happy or not. I answered frankly, if the situation is in favour (because  COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown were already there), I am willing to join the program.

Conclusion

Results were declared after 15 days and guess what ! I got selected for Ph.D. They published a list of "Provisionally" selected candidates and the willing candidates were asked to send an email accepting the seat within 10 days of publication of the list. This was all about my story, hope this will help.

Thank you for reading it. Please leave your comments below and all the best. Have a great day !