Open House- Cisco 1

Name : Shrikant Mether
Company : CISCO Systems.
Position offered :
Date of campus : 13th July
Package offered : CTC – 7 to 8 lac.
Gross – 5.73

The interview procedure was held in SPCE campus at it was common for both VJTI and SPCE. Every student from Computer, IT, Electrical and Electronics was eligible for the procedure i.e. there was no cutoff as in case of other companies (truly open house!!!)

Round 1: Aptitude Test

Around 50 questions to be solved in 1 hr. The questions were broadly divided into three categories
- Maths related questions
- Computer related questions ( DS, AOA, OS, CN etc.)
- Electronics related questions

42 students were selected from this round.



Round 2: Technical Interview

This interview initially started with HR type questions e.g. ‘tell me about yourself’, questions based on resume e.g. extracurricular activities, events organized etc. Gradually they moved on to technical stuff.

They discussed my each and every project in detail starting from ER diagrams, databases used, implementation details etc.

Then they moved on to regular subjects like OS, CN, DS, AOA, C, CPP, DBMS.
Questions were based on
- Interprocess communication, shared memory, pipes.
- OSI layers
- Protocols at various layers
- AVL trees, rotations
- Sorting algorithms
- Database normalization

I had mentioned about a programming contest in my resume. They asked me about questions in that contest, what logic I used to solve those questions, what was complexity of the solution. They even asked me to improve efficiency of one of the solutions.

The technical interview lasted for about 40-45 mins. Students selected after Technical Interview were called for HR interview.


Round 3: HR interview

Here they asked us to write a 5-6 line essay on given topic. But no questions were asked on that topic.

Gereral question were asked like
How was your day?
Why CISCO?
Do you have any other offers?
What are your future plans? GRE, CAT??? :-p

One questions was tricky and totally unexpected – what will you do if Microsoft comes to your campus? Be prepared for such questions :-)

Finally, results were announced at 00:00!!!! Total 14 students, 9 from SPCE and 6 from VJTI were selected.
Preparation recommended:

- Revise all subjects, more stress on CN, OS, DS, AOA, DBMS
- Know your projects well
- Be prepared for any questions on your resume
- Some basic electronics concepts like p-n junctions, transistors will help you to crack the apti.

Contact:
Feel free to contact me anytime.
Email: shri.mether@gmail.com
Phone: 9869530201