CHAPTER 2: UBS
I was finally welcomed to the unfair world of on-campus placements.
The first company that visited our college for third-year internships was UBS.
They picked a random list of 34 students out of 480 and decided that only those students would get to sit for their test and hackathon.
Yes, they decided to go with a hackathon-cum-ideathon.
All of us, sitting there in our college uniforms, took the test.
It was pretty basic — MCQs, a few answer-based questions, core concepts and some basic DSA. I did pretty much all of it on my own.
After that, we were put into the groups they had already divided us into and given the problem statement.
They wanted us to automate the loan application process.
We divided the work and got started.
Honestly, most of it was Claude and us trying to somehow turn whatever we had into a PPT.
About 45 minutes in, we were told:
“You’re the first team presenting.”
And honestly?
I felt wronged.
Everyone presenting after us was going to get more time, and I wasn’t even sure whether we’d make it to the next round.
We gave our presentation pretty quickly and then came the cross-questioning.
Most of the questions were answered by me and one of my teammates.
And then it was over.
I went back to my hostel to have lunch.
On my way back, I was walking with a friend who had been in a different group. We were about five minutes late, and as we were almost reaching the academic building, I saw my other friends walking out.
They started congratulating me.
I had made it to the TOP 7.
For a moment, I was just happy.
Then my friend and I parted ways.
I walked into the building.
She turned around and walked back towards the hostel.
She hadn’t made it to the next round.
And that was the moment it really hit me.
This wasn’t just a hackathon anymore.
We were being eliminated one by one.
And I could very well be the person walking out of that building after the next round.
I walked into the room.
There were only seven of us, along with a few volunteers.
And the atmosphere had completely changed.
Nobody was celebrating anymore.
You could feel the intensity in the room.
I could tell I wasn’t the only one who had realised what we were actually in for.
We were the final seven.
And only a few of us would walk out with an internship.
A few months into the internship season, it became painfully clear just how much branchism plays a role in all of this.
Of those seven, six were from Computer Engineering and one was from ENTC.
I was the one.
The Interview
The first round was supposed to be technical and the second was supposed to be HR.
But this round taught me something I hadn’t accepted during Flipkart.
It’s not 70% skills and 30% luck.
Sometimes, it’s 50–50.
And the ratio keeps dangling from one side to the other.
The panel I got ended up taking only two students.
The guy who went before me told me that he was mostly asked about cricket and trading.
Honestly, I laughed it off.
Until I sat down.
The first few questions were about the company — its history, its work, what it does.
And I knew I was done.
LESSON LEARNT
Don’t wait for the HR round to prepare for the company you’re interviewing for.
The first thing you should know is the company itself.
I made it pretty clear, in the most desperate-but-polite way possible, that I hadn’t really prepared for the HR round yet because that wasn’t what I had been informed about.
It didn’t matter.
The next 30 minutes were basically HR.
From what qualities I look for in professional life…
to what my 400m pace is.
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I was exhausted.
But I think I handled it pretty well.
Although my stunned expression probably gave away everything.
Then came the technical questions.
Question 1
You have $100.
It’s down 10%, then up 10%.
What’s the final profit/loss?
My answer: Loss.
Thankfully, I got this one right.
Question 2
If the input is 1, output 0.
If the input is 0, output 1.
But you can’t use logical operators.
My answer: XOR.
He wasn’t happy.
I tried:
abs(input - 1)
He wasn’t happy with that either.
Eventually, he told me what he wanted:
1 - input
I felt incredibly stupid.
Question 3
I was given a binary string and asked to find the longest sequence of 0s and where it starts.
My answer: Sliding Window.
I wrote the entire code and did a dry run.
He wasn’t happy.
He wanted me to use a data structure.
So I explained two different approaches using stacks.
Question 4
He asked me to perform all the traversals of a tree.
I took a piece of paper and showed him:
- Inorder
- Preorder
- Postorder
There were probably a few more questions here and there, but the interviewer never bothered to look at my resume or ask about my projects.
I asked a few questions at the end.
But by then, I already knew.
I wasn’t getting the next round.
And I didn’t.
Funny enough, the guy who interviewed before me got selected.
Now here’s the hilarious part.
He was asked pretty much the same questions as me.
He gave almost the same answers that I did — answers the interviewer wasn’t happy with when I gave them.
But when he gave them?
The interviewer kept saying:
“Good.”
I remember thinking:
What just happened?
It felt unfair.
But that’s how it’s supposed to be.
You will see people who have never sat in the library, copied someone else’s projects and have almost zero DSA skills get internships before people who grind all day long.
And somehow…
that’s just how it works.
Maybe that’s what you call luck.
I don’t think I’ve completely figured out how to deal with that yet.
But I did learn something from UBS.
I prepare for HR before every interview now.
I research the company before I walk into the interview.
And most importantly, I try to keep my cool even when everything feels completely unreasonable.
Because sometimes you can do everything right and still lose.
And sometimes, someone else can do almost the same thing and win.
That’s placements.
Yonde kurete arigatō.
Jā ne!
