IIT-Hyderabad M.Tech. (RA) - Need Interview Preparation Advice

Question

Greetings!

I appeared for GATE Computer Science in 2018 but could not manage to get into any decent IIT for Monsoon admissions. I had applied to IIT-Hyderabad's winter admissions for M.Tech. (RA) and got shortlisted yesterday.

The interview is to be held on 26th November and I'm not at all prepared as I was not expecting to get shortlisted. This is literally going to be the first interview of my life and therefore I have no experience at all.

I'm currently preparing for GATE-2019 and I also do some freelancing in my free time. I have almost completed all subjects except Engg. Mathematics and Computer Organization.

My desired research area is Machine Learning and I have completed some basic courses on it as well as made some projects related to it (mainly simple classifiers using CNNs). I also have some other decent projects.

Now I wish to know how should I approach my interview preparation? (as I have only 5-6 days left)

What kinds of questions are generally asked during the interview?

They also mentioned that there may be a written test so what about that? How is the difficulty of such written tests?

Any other advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot!

Comments

I can't comment on IIT Hyderabad's MTech interview process, but I attended a summer school in IISc once in which I asked the professors what they look for in interviews to graduate school programmes. They said that the most important thing is to have strong fundamentals and ability to think from first principles. For example, a student told me that he appeared for the CDS interview at IISc. He told them that he is interested in ML and the questions they asked him were what is backprop, how does it work, can you derive it from scratch, what are SVMs, how do they work etc.

So basically, whatever you mention in the interview, make sure your fundamentals are clear in those subjects.

http://www.phd.cse.iitd.ac.in/preparingforphd.html You can use this as a general guide too - the same should apply for MTech admissions, even though this says PhD.

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Ask this in GO fb group to get better response.

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@goxul, thanks! I will make sure not to say anything to impress and be honest with them about what I really know well.

PS - I can definitely derive Backprop from scratch but I'm not sure about other ML algorithms. I know KNNs and Random Forests but not fundamentally deep. I hope they won't ask tough questions related to ML.

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@Sayan, will do that. Thanks!