General Mills Internship — I

To give some context I got selected for a summer internship at General Mills India in November 2023. I’m writing about this a few days after my internship ended XD.

My aim with this blog is to share my interview experience and provide some useful information along the way. Its divided into four sections -

1. Preparation and Orientation
2. Online Assessment and Homework
3. Interviews
4. Hindsight (Skip to this part, if you are only interested in the learnings)

Preparation and Orientation

I’m a guy who is inclined towards Development. A week before General Mills (GM) came to campus, I was reflecting on this and concluded that if I wanted to get in, I had to work much harder on DSA. After calming myself down and doing some research, I ironically came up with an algorithmic plan of action.

Explainer - The plan is to not spend more than 30-45 mins on a problem and do problems from various topics everyday (Stack, Queue, Sorting, L.L, etc) to cover more in breadth than depth.

I made this flowchart keeping in mind that I wasn’t going to become a master of DSA overnight, so let’s just cover up the basics of as many topics as we can.

GM had structured the event into two days. On Day 1 we had the orientation followed by the OA and on Day 2 the selected candidates would be interviewed.

I spent almost all my time getting better at DSA and had no clue about GM as a company. Before the orientation started I found some people had done a lot of research, talked to seniors and knew a lot beforehand (Something which I should’ve done!) but there were also some that were just unbothered.

In the orientation we were introduced to GM as a huge FMCG company. It owns a lot of brands like Pillsbury, Cheerios, Nature Valley, etc. For our internship we would be working in their Digital and Technology (DnT) space. DnT is further divided into various pillars like Digital Core, Data and Analytics, CyberSec. etc. Which are then further divided into teams with specific functions. We got to know about the ECP Program (more on this in part two) and saw a couple of videos about the history and culture of GM.

After a very brief round of questions we were assigned college labs to give the OA.

Online Assessment and Homework

The OA serves as an elimination round and is a little more general in nature. GM’s OA was broadly divided into two sections -

• Non Technical
  • It contained logical reasoning, basic maths, grammar and brain teaser type questions.
  • Ex. - Family Tree Problems, Compound Interest, X-Y-Z Variable Problems, Comprehension, Fill in the Blanks.
• Technical
  • This section contained a mixture of medium to easy OS, DBMS, CN and Coding questions.

I thought I did good after giving the test was still a little unsure cause I wasn’t able to answer 15-20% of the questions. The strongest trick that worked for me here was time boxing.

I did not spend a lot of time on questions that required a lot of computation. Just marked them and came back later. If I found myself stuck, I started eliminating options. If that did not work, I selected the option with which I could form some weird remote logic (guess work).

With that Day 1 ended and we all went home. The results were out at night and I was very happy to see my name on it! After a quick, ecstatic ‘Yes! Yes!’ celebration, I swiftly returned to my hyper-focused preparation.

It was already night and I knew I would not be able to significantly improve upon my DSA skills. So I went through my resume very closely. I had filled it with my past experiences, projects, freelancing gigs, college committee roles, skills and academics.

I thought about possible questions over the different sections and came up with answers to them. I also checked if the projects listed on my resume were working properly, especially the deployed ones.

After the orientation I had this sense of intuition that I should know more about the company before I go in tomorrow. So I fired up my browser and went though a lot of information about GM. Mainly understanding their pillar structure better and reading about public information on their website.

That night, I did not know, if my preparation was enough or not but before drifting off to sleep, just for fun I checked the commute time and mode of transport to GM from my place.

Interviews

Next morning we had to report to college with 2 hard copies of our resume and be dressed sharp in formals. We had some time before the interviews started. All the selected people looked at each others resume, exchanged information and just tried to relax. I went through my resume a couple of times and ensured I knew it in and out.

The interviews were divided into two rounds, the first one was the technical round and the second was Leadership + HR.

When the interviews started we all tried to get information from people who went in first just like Vivas and Roll No. 1. What I found out felt pretty common knowledge — LUCK.

Some got an interviewer who did not ask any coding questions while some were given a Leetcode problem or asked SQL queries. But it wasn’t all luck, turns out it was also based on the resume we presented.

That gave me some confidence.

I took a deep breath as I entered the room and was introduced to two welcoming interviewers. They took my resume and asked the standard, “tell me about yourself”.

I was prepared for this, so told them about my interest in web development, talked briefly about my projects, moved to my position at IETE-TSEC and ended it with my non-technical interests.

They dived deeper into my resume and asked me a couple of questions like how did I implement a certain feature, what could I have done better in project X, what did I learn/achieve by building Y, how did I get a certain opportunity, etc. Basically questions that struck their curiosity while reading my resume.

I was confident and was swiftly able to answer all resume related questions. At a point I think they too realised this and deviated to general questions.

They asked me to name 3-5 current technological trends. I did not explicitly prepare for this but was confident as this did not seem hard. I had Blockchain and Gen-AI in mind but strangely wasn’t able to get any more at that moment.

After a little while they gave in and helped me with Cloud Computing which was a big ‘ah’ moment. Did reduce a bit of confidence in me.

We talked about Gen-AI and Cloud computing for a bit and then they asked me if I had done any research on GM? I confidently said yes and then went on to explain their pillar structure and things I saw over their website.

When I mentioned their website, they caught that hook and asked me if I had seen their website, how did I like it and what could be improved in it. I felt a little trapped cause now that I had mentioned my background in Web Development, I needed to come up with a good answer and also risk suggesting an improvement in their website.

I took a minute and quickly went through everything I saw on their website in my mind. Finally it struck me! Some pages on their website had slow load times, so I mentioned that as an improvement and then diplomatically covered it up by mentioning that it could also be the fault of my internet speed but that is something we could look deeper into.

After this we moved on to questions for them, in which I asked about their role at GM and learnt about their careers briefly.

I bid them farewell and I was happy with how that went. After waiting for a while, I was selected for the final round which was Leadership + HR. Did not have much information about this one except that it had general questions and maybe some scenario based ones.

I went in with confidence and initially faced similar questions like the technical round but as the interview progressed we went deeper into a specifics like what technologies did I use for a project, best practices for a certain tool I used, why did I only choose to use something out of all the available options, what are some features of X technology, etc.

After I was done answering, an HR representative joined us and asked about my background, family, hobbies and also some scenario based questions. Finally they asked if I had any questions for them. This is something I prepared for before-hand.

In the orientation, they mentioned that they were aiming to create a more diverse workforce and while I was all for diversity. I wasn’t sure how can it be achieved in the current scenario. At engineering colleges the ratio of males to females is very poor. So if a company wants to hire the best talent, how can they be diverse. The math won’t work out.

They liked the question and went on to answer along the lines of specific roles needing specific skills, what exactly is diversity and how talent is something that always supersedes it. With that I bid them farewell and as I left that room, I was at peace finally!

Waited for the interviews to get over and about 7 people made it through the last round. All of us then waited for a long time or maybe it was just our impatience. We got really bored while waiting and started forming theories on how many people would they select. Most of us agreed on two with one being a guy and one girl.

They finally called us into a room and after some pleasantries and making our nervousness rise up high, they called out a guy’s name — not mine. I lost all hopes but deep down was a little satisfied as I tried my best. The next moment they called out my name. The happiness came a little later, cause that shock lasted for a while :)

The icing on the cake? We both got this awesome gift hamper before going back home.

Hindsight.

While looking back, every company has some specific goals in mind when they hire interns or basically anyone. If one is able able to identify or even revolve somewhere close to those goals, they might do much better than the competition.

In my opinion one such goal for internships, would be Curiosity to Learn. For full-time jobs skills definitely matter a lot but an intern isn’t expected to know it all but maybe try to learn it all.

Here are all my learnings in summarised. -

1. It’s fine to be strong at either DSA or Development but don’t ever neglect the other.
2. If there’s no time, focus on your weak points and just brush up on the strong ones.
3. Even when there’s no time, there’s always time to plan. Research about the company, interviews and talk to seniors so you can work smart.
4. Time-boxing + Smart Guessing for the win!
5. The interview is controlled by your answers, not their questions.
6. Don’t think of the interviewer as your enemy, they are there to help you.
7. Always, have at-least one question prepared for them. Shows your curiosity.
8. Smile and stay composed during interviews, it’s okay to make mistakes. You are only human :)
9. Don’t take advice blindly, what worked for me does not guarantee that it’ll work for you

PS - This was really fun to write. If you have any specific doubts or questions even after reading this blog, feel free to contact me. I’d be happy to help. Stay tuned for part two :P