I know most of you are placements oriented but in case anyone’s interested in knowing about interviews for research positions through GATE, here’s a detailed guide with lived interview experiences. You can use these positions to take LoR from professors and go for masters abroad if that’s your pla

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.)