u/IllStatistician9129

Please feel free to DM me if you wanna make use of this opportunity.

These positions are usually titled Junior Research Fellow, Junior Project Engineer, Project Associate- I, Project Scientist-I. They are available as advertisements on project portals of different institutions.

I was fortunate enough to be considered by multiple professors and in the end, I am pursuing one of these fellowships through GATE qualified score and an interview. They just need a GATE qualified score, good interview performance, merit and projects.

Usually, professors weigh in your academic profile, your projects, your interview performance and if applicable, research publications.

Research publications are not mandatory but an augment.

So, the first ever interview I gave was from IIT (ISM) Dhanbad. The interviewers were two professors from the CSE department, Dr. Partha Pratim Roy and Dr. Omkar Myapati. They asked me about my projects and I told them about a Vision Transformer model that trained itself on images of spectrograms, generated from plant acoustic waves under different stress conditions. Ok the topic sounds complicated but I had been working on it for over a year under different projects of the same domain.

Q1) What is "attention" in Vision Transformers?

-> You have to answer by starting with the limitations of CNN and the global "attention" or the relationship between the patches that makes attention mechanisms necessary for time series data.

Q2) What is the difference between "sigmoid" and "tanh" activation functions?

-> It was a conceptual question as you have to understand the output range generated by the two activation functions and explain that sigmoid generates probabilities and tanh can also generate negative values, hence it depends on the application.

Q3) What's your experience with Data Acquisition?

-> You can honestly explain your theoretical knowledge, in my case, I had to make a ppt to present to them, so I had explained how it was done in my research.

Q4) What's your experience with AWS?

-> Again, I had a conceptual idea and told them about the services.

I was selected but that time, I couldn't join as my final semester internship was going on.

IIIT Delhi ECE Dr. Anubha Gupta

She bombarded me with questions like which loss function is used in binary classification in case of a neural network, how you'd write a decision tree model from scratch, what's the activation function used by 3 or 5 class classification neural networks. Then one numerical problem on CNN.

I answered a few and couldn't answer a few.

IIT Kharagpur Dr. Debarati Sen

She had a few other profs with her and they asked me about my projects and how I'd convert a time series signal to a power spectrum. Then, they asked me about the bandwidth of a band-limited signal. (Electronics people would be reading this in Analog communication.) I only answered that carrier frequency comes at the centre and how modulating frequency plays a crucial role. I got selected but I had already accepted another offer.

IIT Kanpur Dr. Amitangshu

Sir asked me questions that will help you guys in placements as well.

Q1) DSA question on check whether the array is monotone increasing or monotone decreasing.

Q2) Add an element to the end of a singly linked list. In Python, I had to create node myself using class and init function. Then, I wrote the code.

Q3) Find the smallest and the second smallest numbers in an array.

Q4) A classful address is given and you have to find the number of available hosts. (Obviously you have to identify whether it's classful or classless). Follow up was to write the addresses for network and broadcast, as they are reserved.

Q5) Questions on DHCP, DNS, TCP 3 way Handshake. Sir asked me to Google the exact packet names right in front of him.

Also, I had to present a ppt explaining my background and projects, so I explained about my projects in computer networks involving toy concepts like client server architecture, different ways to debug the same HTTP Connection error, persistent connections.

I have seen that I don't do well in computer based tests, and rather if the same question appears in an interview or on paper, I would mostly be able to do it.

I am from the Electronics and Computer Engineering branch, so I have superficial knowledge about both.

I got to know that research interviews are more about how you express ideas and communicate than about raw knowledge.

(If you're targeting these positions and a professor forces you to do a PhD, please decline the offer.)

2026 passout here.

So, one of my batchmates was a highly intelligent person and had skills in robotics, electronics, development and what not. His communication skills were so good that he bagged only one offer on campus, that too for a very low kpm internship and multiple offers off campus, from one of the biggest service based companies for finance role, startups in Bangalore and Delhi. His CGPA was 8+ and <9 but yeah the exact CGPA will probably reveal him and I can't risk it. I spent 3 months in a lab for internship with him and got so much confidence just listening to how he communicates and how knowledgeable he is. 9+ CGPA isn't the only sign of smartness if anyone feels like I did.

Another batchmate had a similar CGPA and got selected by both TCS Digital/Prime and Cognizant GenC. His name wasn't there in the first list of TCS as he was already selected for GenC. Yes, that happens randomly when CDC wants to maximize the number of students placed. He got TCS Prime when college came to know that Cognizant will delay joining, 5 months after he got selected for both. From January to May, he was stuck.

I had another batchmate. Keeping all the internal disputes aside, he was a highly smart 9+ pointer. He gave interview after interview, in some, through no fault of his own would he not be called for HR rounds and in some, he wouldn't even be interviewed. In some, despite doing everything right and having 9+ CGPA, he wouldn't be shortlisted. He gave OAs even for 30+ LPA and executed all codes on his own, he was such an intelligent guy. In the end, he got an internship that paid maybe less than 25k and CTC was decent but less than what he deserved.

Two of my batchmates gamed a process of 15+ LPA as it was completely virtual, cheated in both OA and interview. Got the offers and did internships and now working full time there. This was one of the reasons the above batchmate didn't get the HR round call. Maybe if they're reading this, I don't know how they'll feel. what about those who are relentlessly trying to be honest and showing actual skills? So yeah, it was bad judgement. (Yeah, both were 9+ pointers) My 9+ pointer batchmate above also wasn't completely honest in every test, but when it mattered and he knew he can make it, the same fate struck him.

Another batchmate, 9+ pointer must've given 11+ interviews, 9 reaching till HR round, and getting rejected. He got a super dream offer in the next try.

Another got 8+ cg, gave 18+ interviews and still had no offer except Cognizant LoI. They are delaying onboarding by 7-8 months and I sincerely hope that he's placed elsewhere.

If you ask me about my offers and CGPA, i really can't tell as I've been mocked way too much by my peers for those, I got multiple low paying offers and my peers said, "Combine all and that's someone's one offer"

All I wanna say is, don't rely on campus placements only. Have a backup, be it a competitive exam, a good contract job, skill based internships at research institutions that hire developers also, maybe other routes like hackathons on and off campus, freelancing.

Yeah there have been friends who got offers on the first try so it's a luck game.