How I got an Internship at Amazon (Off campus)
I got a lot of messages on my various social media handles regarding how I got SDE Intern at Amazon. I will cover the entire application procedure and various steps involved so stay tuned!
How did I get to know about the opening?
It’s been very long but as far as I remember one of my friends sent me a link to the job opening at Amazon for 2023 graduates and then I explored the carrier page of Amazon and finally ended up uploading my resume.
The first step was resume shortlisting but almost everyone got the test link who satisfied the eligibility criteria and the link to the first online assessment was sent to me after almost 2 weeks of me uploading the resume.
Disclaimer: All the information is to the best of my knowledge since it's been a very long time so I might not remember the exact time stamps.
Steps before the Online Assessment:
The entire process was very long and one needs a lot of patience till you get the final results. Before having the Online Assessment Rounds we had various sessions such as Resume Building, Ace your Interview with Amazon, Online Assessment Study Session, and many more. All these sessions were conducted on Twitch and they focused on building the technical as well as aptitude skills of students so that we can perform well in the upcoming assessments.
I personally found the Ace Your interview with Amazon session very helpful because they told us exactly what they are looking for in a candidate and how can we stand out from the rest of the people applying. We had a conversation with a few of the Amazonians and they explained to us how to approach a technical question and they also answered each and everyone's individual doubts at the end of the session.
Online Assessment 1
After around 2 months and after successful completion of all the sessions conducted by Amazon we finally got a mail that our assessment will be held on 16th and 17th of August and it was around a two-hour long exam conducted on mettl platform. The entire assessment was divided into various sections that were MCQ’s on Computer Science Fundamentals ( Difficulty level was medium), Debugging (Easy), and Coding Questions. The coding questions were different for different people so I can rate the overall difficulty as Leetcode medium to hard.
Online Assessment 2
The Online Assessment 2 was a bit hard in my personal experience because it took a lot of time and one needs to have a lot of patience while doing it. It was around a 2-hour long exam and apart from general coding questions, it had 2 new sessions such as Work-life assessment and Aptitude Questions. In Work-Life Assessment to my surprise, there was no timer, and had simple questions. It basically wants to see your priorities and how well you can fit into the company's culture. The best part was this part did not have any time which freaked me out initially because I did not know exactly how much time should I devote to each question. But I would suggest answering this part with utmost honesty and a calm mind because for Amazon it’s leadership principles matter the most and they will only select you if you align with the company’s culture.
There were 2 coding questions and in one of the questions few of my test cases were not passing but even after that I cleared the round because I did extremely well in other sections so don't get disheartened if were not able to perform in one of the actions try to excel in other sections so that it compensates.
Technical Interview
The last step of the internship was a technical Interview and my interview got delayed a lot and I think it was a blessing in disguise because I got more time to brush up on my concepts and revise everything.
My interview was almost one and a hours long conducted on Amazon Chime. For most of the students, it was fixed one-hour-long interview but my interview got extended so I think it totally depends on the interviewer
Coming to the questions my questions were based on Dynamic Programming, trees and he asked me a graph question that I was not very confident of so I just told him my brute force approach. I would say the interview level was different for everyone some of them got easy questions and some got hard so my advice would be doing not to leave anything and be prepared for the worst as well.
In the end, my interviewer asked me questions on my projects and asked a few basic networking questions.
Another Interview tip I would like to give is to be confident and clear. I cannot emphasize how important this is. Let your interviewer know exactly what is going on in your head so that he/she can guide you towards the right approach.
I have planned to write a separate blog on how to prepare for a technical interview because it is a very vast topic and I don’t want to make it too long.
It took around 2 months after I gave the interview that I got the acceptance mail and honestly I was on cloud nine when I saw it. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. I am full of gratitude towards my family and friends who supported me throughout the process and told me that I can do it when I lost all hope.
Lastly, stay happy and keep working hard!
If you have any other doubts or suggestions please feel free to join my telegram community and directly ask questions from me there. https://t.me/muskanagarwall ❤️❤️
