Hello,
I hope you're doing great! 😀 I'm excited to share that I've been selected for the MSR program in ScAI at IIT Delhi for the academic year 2024-25 —yay!
Here's a bit of background about me: In 2023, I took the GATE CS exam and scored 506, with an AIR of 2890. With this score, I received an offer from IIITD for the MTech Research Program. However, I had to decline that offer for personal reasons, and I didn't have any other offers at the time. Fortunately, the GATE committee introduced the DA exam, in which I scored 542 with an AIR of 1519. I knew this score gave me limited options, and the GATE DA eligibility in many colleges was significantly lower compared to GATE CS, which posed an additional challenge.
Fortunately, I was selected for the IITD MSR ScAI written test and the test was conducted in the offline mode. The test was medium level for all the subjects and there was no programming test, infact there were MCQs on the programming questions as well. For each correct answer you get 1mark and for incorrect answer, you get -1/3mark.
Syllabus for written test: https://scai.iitd.ac.in/public/uploads/syllabusAdmissionExam_2.pdf
There were many people shortlisted for the written test, but out of those, only 30 students cleared the test and selected for the MSR interview.
Here's a summary of my interview experience: Before the interview, we were asked to submit a form detailing the research problem we wanted to work on, the professors we wished to work under, and our reasons for choosing those professors. During the interview, the professors had my MSR application and that form open in front of them.
Questions:
1. Which ML algorithms are you familiar with ? Make sure to answer this carefully, because they'll be going in-depth and there will be follow-up questions as well.
2. One DSA problem with story similar to this:https://leetcode.com/problems/n-th-tribonacci-number/description/
3. Probability question: What are disjoint events, independent events, joint conditional marginal distributions.
Some resources which are useful:
Algebra: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DDD91010BC51F8
Probability: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60A3XMwZ5sep719_nh95qOe
ML: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1xHD4vteKYVpaIiy295pg6_SY5qznc77
Also, you can go through the below resource which contains great interview tips and previous interview experineces
https://interviewsaftergate.quora.com/
Tips:
In the form when they are asking for research problem you want to work on: it will be great if you have the clarity on the problem/domain you want to work on and why. It is completely okay to say that you don't have experinece in AI and want to explore the field. Later you can decide the problem you want to work on.
