Hey all, I am Amol Shah, now in my fourth year of dual degree in CSP. In this blog post, I will be sharing my internship journey at Qualcomm! Being an ardent reader of such blog posts, I know many of you would be interested in the preparation and selection process, and I have tried to keep it as informative as possible.
Pre-internship season
Since COVID had cut short our 4th semester, I found myself at home with a lot of free time – luckily, my two close friends and I got together to start preparing for the internship season. We prepared for aptitude tests, coding practice, relevant core subjects like Analog, Digital, Communication and general interview preparation. We also reviewed each other’s resumes very minutely, which I feel was one of the primary reasons our resumes were much better than what we originally started with. My first recommendation would be to make a group of people you can prepare with seriously and have similar target profiles.
Some preparation tips for electrical core profiles - For Analog, primarily revise basic concepts from 2nd year Analog Circuits course. MOSFET, BJT related stuff should be ingrained. Amplifier circuit concepts and ELC circuits are also significant. For Digital, 2nd year Digital Systems course along with a thorough revision of VHDL/Verilog will suffice. Some important topics are Finite State Machine, combinational and sequential circuits, Boolean logic, counters, clock-based circuits, flip-flops. For signal processing, signals and systems course with Fourier transform, Nyquist criteria as significant focus points. One can find company-specific questions on sites like Glassdoor which you can look over. You can also practice mock interviews - it is a crucial skill that improves with practice. Many brilliant candidates lose out due to interview anxiety and lack in communication skills.
Internship season
As the first online semester started, it was an exhausting month of watching lectures, doing assignments, giving tests and preparing for upcoming interviews. Do keep checking the internship blog and setting up reminders – you don’t want to miss any test because you overslept or forgot about it! A suggestion here would be to not get your emotions too extreme during the season– avoid being too stressed and get cut off from the world or not care at all by taking it casually. Third-year internships are very crucial and the and profile you join must be chosen carefully as there exists the possibility of getting a pre-placement offer. However, not getting one of your choice is also not the end of the world – many opportunities exist later too. Also, most candidates will face a couple of rejections – mentally prepare yourself not to be bogged down by it. Despite seemingly good interviews, I did not make the final cut for Texas Instruments and Sony Japan. August ended with me giving the Qualcomm test for the hardware profile in which I attempted the digital section since I felt that the questions were easier than communication.
Come September, I had the interviews for Adobe and Qualcomm on back-to-back days. For Adobe, I was asked questions based on my resume and a live coding demo. The interviewer was impressed by my coding skills in python and my approach towards solving the problem. Be sure to think aloud when a problem is given and show your approach rather than thinking silently and boring the interviewer! Even if your approach is not correct, they want to see how you think – whether you think logically and sequentially. The next day, the results for Adobe came, and I was selected just an hour before my Qualcomm interview. The interview started, and to my surprise, the interviewer started asking communication questions that I was unprepared for since I expected digital-based questions! Looking back, I think that my specialization in CSP must have led to my interview being for the communication system. Thankfully, the Digital Signal Processing course was running that semester in which many of the concepts required from Signals and Systems had been revised. I was also asked puzzles, some of which I had seen during the pre-internship season preparation. The second round was also technical and was similar to the first round. The third HR round was just a confirmation that I would be accepting the internship offer if offered. At the end of the day, I was thrilled to know that I had been selected for Qualcomm too! I struggled with choosing between the two different profiles during the whole process – coding and core electrical. I liked both the profiles and enjoyed both of them, which made the choice hard for me. In the end, I decided to go with Qualcomm mainly for the following reasons – primarily, I wanted to explore the core industry and since there were fewer core companies, changing my profile from software to core would be more difficult than the other way around.
One thing which is frequently overlooked is the long-term prospects of the internship you will accept – I would suggest you to do some research on the PPO, package and full-time profile aspects; after all, there is a significant chance you will be continuing in the same company after graduating!
The actual Internship period
Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, we couldn’t have an onsite internship at Bangalore and had to settle for work from home. Working from home had its benefits though, primary being able to wake up just 20mins before logging in :) Since hardware projects were hard to work while at home, we were assigned tool development projects. I developed two tools in MATLAB and Python, which were useful to debug problems in the hardware systems. I was also assigned a third research-based project based on optimization of a communication protocol which unfortunately had to be cut short due to me falling sick. I used to have a daily meeting with my mentor, who used to take progress updates and discuss the next way ahead. Although social interaction was much lesser than what it would have been in an offline setting, we used to have biweekly chat sessions, and we had a virtual team lunch once too!
Overall, the experience at Qualcomm was very nice; the workload was just right – not too much and not too little. My mentor, manager and other employees were also quite friendly and approachable. Since I was a DD student, based on my work during the internship period, I was offered a PPI – Pre-placement interview/internship, which is a call-back for another internship next year which I immediately accepted of course :)
For any further questions, feel free to contact me.