My Internship Recruitment Experience at Credit Suisse

So it’s been around two months since I interviewed for Credit Suisse, a global Investment bank headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland, for the role of Technology Intern. I have decided to write about my overall experience throughout the whole recruitment procedure.

Overview

In a nutshell, the procedure for the recruitment looked something like this:

• As it was an on-campus recruitment drive, I submitted my resume and a few other details.
• After the resume filtering, I received the online test link.
• After a couple of days, I got shortlisted for the interviews.
• After two interviews, I was able to bag the internship.

So let’s get started with the whole internship recruitment experience!

Round One: The Online Test

Clearing the Online Test was a huge challenge for me as I was pretty new to Competitive Programming. The test was conducted on HackerEarth. The pattern was:

• 2 MCQ questions (6 marks each)
• 3 Programming questions (Two 50 marks questions and One 100 marks question)

The MCQ questions were completely random. The questions I received were based on Microsoft SQL Server and Hadoop Hive, while others received questions based on XML, PostgreSQL, C#, Java, Python, and other topics. I did not know the answer to either of the questions, so I just guessed them, as answering each question was mandatory.

The three programming questions were as follows (Not the exact questions, framed according to my memory and rough work):

Max Divisor Tree (50 M)

Given a tree with a root node N, which has a property that the children of any node are one of the factors of that node (except 1 and the number itself). What is the maximum height of the tree?

✅ I solved this question, passing all 10 test cases.

The Abandoned City (50 M)

You are in an abandoned city, and the only way to get out is by paying some coins. To collect these coins, you need to traverse some of the N houses. Every ith house has a maximum of Ai coins. You can start traversing from any house but you can only go in one direction (left or right). To get out of the city, you need to pay K coins. Find the minimum number of houses you need to visit to get out of the city (-1 if it is not possible to get out).

✅ I solved this question partially, passing 6/10 test cases.

Number of Ones (100 M)

You are given a binary string with 3 ones and 2 zeroes. After an operation, it has 4 ones and 3 zeroes. The operations follow the pattern:

• No. of 1s in ith string = No. of 1s in (i-1)th string + 3 × No. of 0s in (i-2)th string.
• No. of 0s in ith string = 2 × No. of 0s in (i-1)th string + 2 × No. of 1s in (i-2)th string.

Given N, find the number of ones in the Nth string. Return the answer modulo 10⁹ + 7.

✅ I solved this question partially, passing 4/10 test cases.

The overall difficulty of the MCQs was Hard, and that of the Programming questions was Intermediate.

✅ 32 students were selected for the second round, and I was one of them.

Round Two: The Technical Interview

This interview was supposed to be a Technical Interview, and I was expecting a lot of questions about Data Structures and Algorithms. However, it was more like a techno-HR round for me.

• Platform: Zoom
• Time: 35-40 mins

We were made to wait in the lobby till our turn. Then we were sent into a breakout room from where we were sent to the rooms for the interview. There were 2 interviewers for me. The first one asked tech-oriented questions, while the other asked situation-based questions. Both the interviewers were super friendly.

First Interviewer:

• Can you explain Flutter to me?
  Explained Flutter and Dart in short.
• Is Dart/Flutter similar to Kotlin?
  Explained how Dart has features from various languages like JavaScript and Java.
• Questions related to my project (Fast n’ Fresh)
  Discussed responsibilities and tech stack.
• Asked about my internships and team sizes.
• Asked about Agile methodology.
  I had no idea but explained my workflow at previous internships.
• Asked about DBMS.
  Mentioned I had it in my current semester and preferred practicals over theory.
• What is metadata?
  Guessed it as data about data in a database.
• What data structures are you comfortable with?
  Mentioned arrays, queue, stack, linked lists, but not trees and graphs.

Second Interviewer:

• Have you worked with unknown teammates before?
• How would you handle a team where members ask too many doubts?
• Would you prefer working with people from different cultures or familiar people?
• Would working with a disabled colleague affect the project?
• If a goof-up happened from your side, and the team was ready to share the blame, would you go with the team or take responsibility?

✅ 16 students were selected for the internship, and I was one of them.

Conclusion

A few tips if you are appearing for the interview:

• ✅ Be confident while answering questions.
• ✅ Review every detail in your resume/portfolio.
• ✅ Be honest and say NO if you don’t know something.
• ✅ Pay attention during the Pre-Placement Talks.
• ✅ Be patient! You might have to wait for long hours in the interview process.

Thanks for reading! 🎉