IIT Gandhinagar Interview Experience Rgular PhD

I was motivated to pursue PhD during my master's dissertation work on NLP. I applied for a regular PhD program at IIT Gandhinagar around May 2024. However, I didn’t have any fellowships when I applied. I have been shortlisted for the first round. The interview was completely virtual and conducted via Zoom meeting. My interview was scheduled for 20 April 2024 at 12:30 PM. There were two panelists in the meeting (i.e. panelist 1 was Dr. Krishna Prasad Miyapuram and panelist 2 was Dr. Shanmuganathan Raman). The interview continued for 5 to 10 minutes.

Round 1

panelist1 starts asking questions, as follows

1. Tell me about your educational background and research interests.
2. How do Transformers work in NLP?
3. What is positional embedding? and why we need this.
4. In Bengali, do we need positional embedding, and why so?
5. What is LSTM and why do we use it?
6. What is RNN, and how does it work?
7. Do you hard about Machine Translation? Big tech giants like google and Microsoft had already developed machine translation. Why is still research going on it?
8. What will be your research objective, if you pursue PhD?
9. How do we develop a GPT for Bengali?
10. Suvasish, thank you for your time. We should wrap up this conversation. You can leave.

luckily I got shortlisted for the next round of interviews, and they scheduled my round 2 on 22 April at 9:40 AM via Google Meet.

Round 2

I told them, that my research interest lies in the field of NLP, so I was unsure whether I needed to approach any professor before round 2. I went through the faculty profile at IITGN and found there is one professor who is working in the same field which I have my research interest on. His name was Dr. Mayank Singh. I wrote an email telling him, I wanted to work under his supervision, and whether I should mention his name in round 2 if I needed to mention any supervisor's name.

In round 2, there were 3 panelists this time. The first 2 panelists were as before and there was Dr. Mayan Singh as a 3rd panelist. panelist3 started asking me questions as below

1. Tell me some of the projects you worked on. (I told them a project based on the seq2seq transformer, which I was working at that time)
2. Explain the structure of the transformer.
3. How normalization works in the transformer. (not able to answer)
4. Do you know self-attention? How it works?
5. How word embedding is done in the transformer.
6. What kind of word embedding have you done in your project?
7. What is your role in the project you just mentioned?
8. What is your long-term goal after PhD?
9. Panelist 2 asked when your master's will end.
10. panelist 1 asked Just to be clear, you have a qualified gate, right?

Conclusion

It was a great experience and hopefully, the dot created will be connected somewhere in my future.