19 July: Gave the TCS exam.
22 July: Got shortlisted for TCS PRIME.
13 August: Got the TCS Ninja offer.

So naturally, after seeing PRIME, I walked into the interview thinking, “Okay, maybe this is going somewhere.”

TCS had a different storyline. 💀

Technical Round

Started fairly normally:

"What is an LLM?”
“Tell me about your project.”
“What did you implement in your project?”
“Write a program for one of the modules used in your project.”

And then**: “Scrape Amazon.in. Go to the Electronics section and get the items below a given price.”**

Me internally:

“Ah. This is where my confidence ends.”

I couldn't properly answer the Amazon scraping question. 💀

They continued:

“Write a program that input a 10-page PDF to an AI of your choice containing .env and main.py files.”

Then:“What is the cost of the input and output tokens of the LLM used in your project?”

At this point I was just trying to make sure my brain was still connected to the internet.

Managerial Round

Then came the “let's see what you actually did” round:

“Tell me your role in your internship.”
“What task was accomplished by you?”
“What challenges did you personally face?”
“What if your internship gives you a PPO and TCS offers you a job? What will you choose and why?”
“What are your short-term goals?”
“Why do you want to join TCS?”

The “not the challenge about a skill you didn't know” part especially made me realize they were not accepting the standard interview answers. 😭

HR Round

And finally, HR decided there was still some oxygen left in my lungs.

“What do you do in your free time?”
“What are your 3 preferred locations?”
“You create vlogs. What will you do about TCS restrictions on photography and videography?”
“What if someone else in the office posts unauthorized videos?”
“Why Mumbai?”
“Why did you choose Hyderabad as your first preference?”

At some point I stopped feeling like I was attending a job interview and started feeling like I was applying for TCS citizenship, security clearance, and employment at the same time. 💀

And then the result...

TCS Ninja.

So the timeline became:

PRIME shortlist → interview interrogation → Amazon humbled me → HR investigated my entire existence → Ninja offer.

Was I disappointed? Yes.
I was expecting something above 5 LPA after the PRIME shortlist, so getting Ninja definitely wasn't what I had expected.

Still, an offer is an offer.

Posting this mainly because I wanted to share the experience. Maybe someone else preparing for TCS will see this and realize that the interview can go from “Tell me about your project” to “Now recreate Amazon” surprisingly fast. 😭

And yes, the Amazon question still haunts me.

Hi everyone,

I’m a B.Tech student in AI & Data Science (2023–2027) actively looking for a research-focused internship in AI / ML, especially around LLMs, RAG pipelines, and model fine-tuning.

I don’t have formal industry experience yet — but I do have hands-on research and systems-building experience, and I’m more interested in learning deeply and contributing to real research than chasing buzzwords.

What I’m genuinely interested in

LLMs & VLMs (fine-tuning, evaluation, failure modes)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), document intelligence

Multimodal models (vision–language, audio–text)

Research-oriented engineering (experiments, ablations, benchmarks)

What I’ve worked on

Primary author on a research paper accepted at an international conference (vision–language assistive system)

Fine-tuned Salesforce BLIP on a custom dataset for real-time assistive navigation

Built CNN–RNN hybrid models for speech emotion recognition (92%+ accuracy)

Worked on time-series modeling (LSTM + CNN) for scientific data (NASA Space Apps)

Built RAG-style pipelines and transformer-based NLP systems for large-scale text analysis

Tech stack Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, LangChain, CNNs/RNNs/Transformers, RAG, FastAPI, PySpark, basic cloud (AWS/GCP)

I’m not claiming to be an expert. I am someone who:

Reads papers instead of just tutorials

Enjoys debugging models more than demos

Wants mentorship and real research exposure

Is willing to work hard, learn fast, and contribute seriously

If you’re a researcher, startup founder, PhD student, or team working on LLMs / applied AI research and open to mentoring an intern — I’d genuinely love to connect.

Resume / GitHub / LinkedIn available on request. Thanks for reading.