2023 Midstream 211 Research Interview Interview (NanSoft, Nanda AI, Beihang CS, Southeast, Zhejiang Soft, etc.)

2026/08/2830829 words63 min read

"TLDR: 2023 Zhongliu 211 insurance research experience sharing, covering the detailed experience of summer camp and pre-recommendation exemption. Including the assessment status and interview skills of Beihang CS, Fudan AI, Shanghai Jiaotong University of Science and Technology and other universities."

I am rushing to write a belated interview at the beginning of 2024. I hope that latecomers will not follow my old path and suffer big losses. Let’s talk about the results first. The Software School of NTU is my final destination. If Nansoft hadn’t been so arrogant in the early stage and set the entry bar too high, I wouldn’t have been a candidate. For me, who is a novice (I will talk about it later in the article, I am really good at it, fun-loving, socially fearful, and with a bad mentality...), I really don’t dare to expect too much, and I am very satisfied with the result.

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Basic situation

School: Midstream 211 (I won’t disclose the specific school, and don’t use box weapons if you guess it), artificial intelligence major

Ranking: rk1 (approximately 80 people in the major). I know how to write previous years’ test papers, so my GPA is higher. Unfortunately, I forget about it after taking the exam.

Level 4 and Level 6: CET-4: 600, CET-6: 550

Scientific research: None (I once interned at Qingshen Online for a month, but the direction of my work was related to computer networks. I was completely unfamiliar with it and ran away directly)

Project: Two school-level scientific and technological innovations. They are not good at it. During the interview, they were criticized by the teacher.

Competitions: US H*

Delivery status

| ----------------------- | ---------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------- |

| NTU AI | Summer Camp | Enrollment | There were 10+ candidates on the waiting list, and I almost got on the waiting list in the end. It’s a pity that the people in front of me were too good at dragging them down |

| Southeast University | Two-in-one summer camp and pre-recommendation exemption | Entering the camp | Because I over-polished my resume and wrote some techniques that I was unfamiliar with, I was tortured on the spot and was on the waiting list |

| School of Software, Zhejiang University | Pre-recommendation exemption | Enter the camp | Enter the camp, but did not do well in the computer test, which just proves that my algorithm ability is weak, and I am a candidate |

| Department 6, University of Science and Technology of China | Pre-recommendation exemption | Enrollment | At this time, there are almost no teachers with quotas, please send |

From the situation of entering the camp, it was only thanks to rk that I was able to enter the camp. So let me tell you, rk is really important. No matter how bad the real level is, having rk is a universal pass to enter the camp. You have to be in the top 3 no matter what. However, judging from the results, it is simply not enough to enroll in the camp. The excellent enrollment rate of most summer camps is around 30%. So what if you enroll in the camp? The prototype was directly exposed in the interview machine test and became 70% of the eliminated candidates. Last year, I fought and lost repeatedly and was on the waiting list. I was on the waiting list until I reached 929. It was really tiring.

Preliminary preparation

I am a relatively undisciplined person. Although I talked about preparing for the summer camp every day from March to June, in fact, I mostly played and occasionally brushed up on the interview experience (actually proven to be somewhat useful, many teachers ask the same questions every year, and you can prepare in advance by looking at the interview experience). Then I did not review 408 much, which also led to my failure in the subsequent assessments of Nansoft and Nanda AI, which have written exams. Looking at the review now, I must fully review the data structure. You can do the questions with the Wangdao Data Structure Postgraduate Entrance Examination Book, and you will definitely pass the written test. In terms of algorithms, I slowly and leisurely completed more than a hundred LeetCode questions in three months, and basically sent them all during the computer test at the summer camp. For non-ACM players, it is still necessary to brush up on algorithm questions to maintain a good feel; in mathematics, I looked at the basic concepts and frequently asked questions of line generation and probability theory (such as the rank of a matrix, the difference between probability and statistics, the law of large numbers...); in terms of ceramics, I personally don't like ceramics, because ceramics may be assessed several months in advance, and it is very tiring to do the arranged assessment projects, so I did not do ceramics in advance. However, this also resulted in the fact that when I was admitted to Department 6 of the University of Science and Technology of China (you need the college’s excellent teaching program and the teacher’s offer to be combined into the final offer at the same time), no teacher had a quota to accept me. So if you should be ceramic, you still have to be ceramic. You can't steal it if you are lazy.

The dismal road to summer camp

Fudan

Puxindan is the first camp to open, and the bar is very high. 211 only requires rk1 to enroll in the camp, with a total of 100 people enrolled in the camp, 20 people in the excellent camp, and the admission rate is 20%. But at this time, many schools had not even finished their final exams. Many people, including mine, had obtained camp qualifications but were forced to give up participating. (It is possible to defer the exam, but it is very troublesome, and you cannot use the excuse of attending summer camp, you can only say that you are sick or something like that).

Beihang University

Beihang University is the school that likes ACM the most. The summer camp application form only allows you to write rankings and ACM competitions. There is no space for you to fill in if you want to write a project. If there is an ACM brand but the ranking is not good, feel free to fill in the application form of Beihang University. Beihang University welcomes acm✌🏻.

The Beihang assessment was the first day after the last exam in our school, so I was in a rush and the whole process was a very unpleasant experience. I remember that I finished the exam in the afternoon and set off directly after the exam. It was already evening when I arrived in Beijing, and it was already very late when I arrived at the B&B near Beihang University. The weather in Beijing will be extremely hot for the next two or three days, so be sure to bring an umbrella. During those three days and two nights, I didn't sleep well, didn't eat well, and was charged more than a thousand yuan (including round-trip high-speed rail ticket money) and didn't even get a waitlist. Thinking about it makes me feel sad.

Ahem, let’s get back to the topic. The first day of Beihang University is the computer test, which can be converted into CSP, so you must take CSP more than three years before your junior year and work hard to get high scores. You can take the CSP test three times a year. The difficulty of the questions is sometimes higher and sometimes lower. If you take the test a few more times, you will always hit an easy one. A score of 270 is almost enough. In this way, you will not lose money in conversion. Because my CSP was too low, I didn’t convert it and took the computer-based test directly. There are two questions in the computer-based test. The first question is about scoring points. The amount of data is also very small. It does not require any optimization algorithm and can be passed directly. The second question is similar to the third question in CSP. It is not too difficult in terms of algorithm, but it is more troublesome in engineering implementation. I can no longer remember the topic at that time. If I search online, someone should share it. By the way, the second question this time seems to be similar to the questions from Beihang’s summer camp in previous years, so if I had picked up Beihang’s computer-based test questions from previous years in May and June and tried them, I wouldn’t have been so miserable.

That night, I thought I had only completed one question and was about to send it in. I almost bought a ticket and went home, but I still got an interview the next day. When I entered the interview room the next day, I was about seventh in line. I waited slowly for an hour, during which everyone was memorizing self-introductions in English and looking at resumes. If the person in front comes out, everyone will rush forward to ask the teacher about the process and content of the questions. If the student is willing to share, they can come over and listen. When they go up, they may also be asked the same questions.

During my interview, I first read the assessment instructions aloud, just to prevent you from being too nervous. Then there will be teachers who are responsible for asking questions about mathematics, discreteness and data structures, and finally the teachers who are responsible for project questions will ask questions.

The teacher in charge of mathematics asked: the rank of matrices, the law of large numbers, Euler's equation (I saw that I wrote a lot of mathematics competitions and thought I was good at mathematics), how to find normal vectors in point clouds (I asked mainly because I saw CV in my project), who is faster, quadratic programming or linear programming?

The teacher responsible for discreteness and data structures asked: I will give you a truth table and how to derive the truth expression. Let me talk about the two minimum spanning tree algorithms and how to optimize them. Should I use a max heap or a min heap?

The teacher in charge of the project began to randomly diverge and dig deeper into the project. Finally, he even asked about GPU parallel computing, which was true. Of course, this is of no reference to everyone. After all, everyone’s project is different, and the teacher’s direction is also different. He may not be familiar with your project and ask a lot of strange questions, so just prepare accordingly.

The entire interview only lasted 20 minutes, and the basic questions only lasted about five or six minutes. This part was not too difficult, but the questions asked in the remaining ten minutes were beyond my knowledge. I have been sorry. I suggest that you speak as much as possible when you encounter things you can speak (such as the basic course part), and the speaking speed can be slightly slower, for a total of twenty minutes, to delay the time and avoid the teacher asking questions that you do not know. Students with social anxiety practice with their roommates and try not to be nervous. When nervous, they tend to speak quickly and chaotically. Another thing is to read more interviews. The questions asked in basic courses are pretty much the same every year. You can prepare in advance and just follow the project. Some teachers are familiar with your project and will ask you about knowledge points you know. For example, the NLP project digs into transformer and then attention. But if the teacher is engaged in other aspects, he may not understand the questions at all.

The results came out on the night of the third day. It should be that the computer test was too bad and it failed in the end. Because this year is the first year offline after the epidemic, the waiting list is very short, so I don’t even have a waiting list. Goodbye Beihang.

NTU AI

NTU AI is one of the summer camps I have had the best experience in, with sign-in in the morning, lectures in the afternoon, and coffee breaks.

The phone camera was broken and the photo was blurry.

The next day is a computer test➕written test in the morning, and a 12-minute interview in the afternoon.

This year’s topic was different from previous years. I was confused when I saw the artificial intelligence test. I thought I was going to learn about neural networks? As a result, I found out during the exam that the first question was a very simple one that closely followed the original question (the longest substring without repeated characters), and the second question was a manual kmeans algorithm. I was given some already written code, and you could fill in the blanks yourself. The questions were not difficult, but it would be more convenient to familiarize yourself with the interface calls in numpy. The written test is more complicated. It tests data structures (Huffman trees, various calculations in binary trees), probability theory, machine learning (adaboost, under-fitting and over-fitting curves, over-fitting mitigation methods), optimization (calculating kkt conditions), knowledge representation (a lot of English questions, sorry undergraduate teacher, although you taught it, I didn't learn it well and forgot it after the exam). The stuff is quite complicated, a bit like the papers for the postgraduate entrance examination, and the test results are average.

In the afternoon, there was an interview, which was divided into three groups and held simultaneously. The teachers in the group I was in were relatively good, very amiable and not irritating. Many of the questions asked are asked every year and can be prepared by looking at interviews in previous years. For a total of twelve minutes, we asked about Bayesian approaches to discrete and continuous processing, the advantages and disadvantages of some assumptions (naive Bayes and the assumption that parameters satisfy a certain distribution), and whether decision trees are considered dynamic programming? , kl divergence, rank of matrix, why svm needs to be converted into a dual problem, changes in parameters before and after conversion, English questions introduce some of the more famous and important models in cv, do you think AI will defeat humans...

It seems that the computer test and written test were taken by NTU AI undergraduate students. You can refer to the article [2023 Nanjing University Artificial Intelligence Institute (NJUAI) Open Day Review] (https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/647536897?utm_id=0), which also provides a practice URL for the computer test, which is very good.

Finally, about a week later, I was on the waiting list and ranked 10+. According to the situation in previous years when more than 20 candidates were on the waiting list, it was basically stable. However, it was a pity that because of the huge offline changes this year, the people in front of me refused to release the offer for more than three months in a row, which made me give up hope. Ten minutes after I was filled by Nansoft on the day of 929, Nanda AI called and said that I was on the waiting list. At this time, most people had already run away. It was too extreme. I heard that the NTU AI Academic Affairs Office slowly called the waiting list until 30➕ before the first candidate came on board.

929 A game for the brave, come if you dare. Cry to death 😭.

Big Data Institute of USTC

The School of Big Data at USTC is a very complex but also very strong school, with half of the teachers from the mathematics department, almost half of the teachers from the computer department, and even a few teachers from the biology department. The computer teachers in the Big Data College are very strong, including big names such as He Xiangnan, who are recruiting students there. Although the School of Big Data is one of the few weak COM schools in the University of Science and Technology of China and does not require contacting teachers in advance (that’s why I applied for the School of Big Data instead of Departments 6 and 9), but experts like He are usually booked in advance by undergraduates in the school, so it is difficult to grab a spot.

The camp experience at USTC is also the best in my opinion (the other one is NTU AI which provides tea breaks). Not only are they given a variety of gifts (schoolbags, T-shirts, meal vouchers, notebooks) but accommodation is also included! ! ! (Beihang University, I’m talking about you, bad review!)

Big Data Science Summer Camp welcomes you

Accommodation hotels provided by University of Science and Technology of China

The weather was not good that day, it was raining

There are about a hundred people enrolled in the School of Big Data at the University of Science and Technology of China. The admission rate is 20%. The teachers are all kinds of experts. Most of the participants in the camp are 985, so they are already afraid of difficulties. On the evening of the first day of the lecture, the results of the NTU AI assessment came out. I was a candidate. I felt a little depressed. I felt that the Big Data School must be a difficult school. After all, there were so many 985 big guys, so I gave up the exam that night and took the high-speed train home. The trip to the University of Science and Technology of China is over.

My mentality was really bad, and I gave up the exam at that time, so I didn’t have any experience to give you. Here I suggest that everyone must exercise their mentality on a daily basis, ε=(´ο｀*))) Oh ~

Pre-promotion to avoid the bleak road

Southeast

Southeast's summer camp and pre-recommendation exemption are two-in-one, with only one assessment. In August, only one school in Southeast was running summer camp at this time.

Southeast is a semi-weak com, and you need to contact the instructor for recommendation before entering the camp. The process is not complicated, and there is no messy early assessment. I contacted a teacher who does medical imaging. He responded quickly. He made a ppt introducing himself and then recommended me to join the camp. It seems that one teacher can recommend about ten students, so feel free to contact the teacher. Most teachers are still willing to help recommend.

Southeast has unified requirements for displaying ppts. You can only use the template they provide, which is about 8 pages of ppt. The things you can write are really limited. Because I kept failing during the summer camp, my mentality was frustrated, and I felt that my project was rubbish, so I worked very hard to polish my resume and ppt. I added some fashionable-looking technologies to my school-level innovation, which I had heard of but was not very familiar with (a big taboo!!!).

As a result, during the assessment and presentation of the ppt, the first step was to introduce myself and ask questions in English, and introduce my most satisfying project in English (ah, I was not prepared at all, I only prepared common questions such as self-introduction in English), but I didn’t answer the question well. The teacher felt that I was not very good at English and asked me to answer it again in Chinese. When talking about the polished and innovative points of my project, the following teacher happened to be doing this. He immediately knocked me down with a series of interrogations. He also politely said that my work was too superficial and pointed out the errors in my expression. I really cried to death. The teachers in Southeast were so gentle and gave me too much face, because I had never used these things before...

The final result was of course the candidate. I took reference from the situation in the Southeast in 2022 and found that the candidates were relatively strong, and the number of candidates reached more than 180. Those at the top were awarded master's degrees, and those at the bottom were awarded associate's degrees. But it was changed again in 2023. The academic master's degree and professional master's degree were registered separately, and the waiting list was separate. The waiting list for the professional master's degree I applied for was more than 70 people. Later, 929 did not pay attention to the position of the waiting list. Goodbye Southeast, Alternate++.

Summary: Small polish (polishing) is a bonus, big polish (polishing to the point where you are not very familiar with it) is a dead end; you must be very familiar with what you write, because you never know which corner of your resume the teacher will ask you questions from. The interview only lasts about ten minutes, and there is a lot of luck. If you are asked a question in a place you are not familiar with, you will send it. There is no way. I would rather the project be simpler than something that I don’t know how to answer and cannot answer.

Department 6, University of Science and Technology of China

During the summer camp, I gave up taking the exam because of my mental breakdown, but I didn't expect that I would come back again in the end. There are only very, very few places (single digits) for the pre-recommendation of the 6 departments of the University of Science and Technology of China. Most people in the college can pass. The difficulty lies in contacting the teachers to formulate an offer.

Don’t even think about contacting AI teachers at this time. AI is so popular that it was all divided up by the big guys during the summer camp. I sent emails to almost all the teachers in the AI field, but they were all silently rejected. Later, I sent an email to a teacher who does medical imaging. There was only one spot left in their group, and I was kicked out by other students.

There was really nothing to talk about in the college interview. The pass rate was as high as 90%. I was asked about several solutions to the longest palindromic substring of the algorithm question (central expansion algorithm, dp method, horse-drawn carriage algorithm) and the corresponding time complexity.

I met a classmate online who also participated in the pre-recommendation exemption. I heard from her that she contacted the teacher in May and June, so she successfully landed in the University of Science and Technology of China during the pre-recommendation exemption for the 6th series. I sent it because there was no teacher to accept it. For students who want to go to the University of Science and Technology of China, it is still important to contact the teacher in advance. This is really important.

Nansoft

Nansoft, my Nansoft, ah, thank you for taking me in, I am your 929 devout believer.

Nansoft and NTU AI are similar. They have organic exams, written exams and interviews at the same time. However, the written exam is open book and you can bring books. The exam includes 4 papers (database, operating system, computer network, data structure). Most of the questions are original, and many of the questions are from previous postgraduate entrance examination questions. I brought the basic Wangdao postgraduate entrance examination book with me at the time. After flipping through it for a while, I saw the original question and copied it directly to the answer, hahahaha.

The computer test seems to have five questions, involving both algorithm and engineering questions. The engineering question provides an incomplete code for a music player, and you need to fill in the blanks yourself. There are two languages available, c++ and java, but java is strongly recommended! During the exam, the teacher also said that in so many years, only one person had passed the exam using C++. For students who don't know Java, spend a week looking at the syntax. You can make a music player or some kind of library management system by yourself. Just practice.

The interview was relatively random. The group I was assigned to did not ask any basic 408 knowledge. First, I randomly selected the abstract part of an English paper and talked about what this article was about. Later, I was asked about the content of the project throughout the whole process. Finally, there was a political multiple-choice question. During the project, the teacher kept asking me what was the highlight of the thing I made. Maybe it was too simple and the teacher didn’t like it.

Because when Nansoft was pre-recommended, the number of excellent camp places was already very small. There were about 50 or 60 people enrolled in the camp, and the number of excellent camp places was less than ten. And because I did not do well in the computer-based test, I was still on the waiting list... I later learned that the Nansoft summer camp had a very high excellent admission rate, but during the summer camp I applied for NTU AI (the excellent admission rate was 30%), so I missed out on the Nansoft summer camp, which has a very high excellent admission rate.

The switch to offline in 2023 caused Nansoft to become arrogant and set the entry bar very high. Many 985 players did not enter the camp in the first few days. I was so arrogant in the early stage, but so miserable in the later stage. On the day of 929, all the pigeons from Youying ran away, which caused the pigeons on the waiting list to go directly, and I landed successfully. Although ten minutes later, NTU AI (Master's degree, scholarship, dormitory, cheap tuition) called me and said that I was on the waiting list, but at this time I was already a candidate for Nansoft (Master's degree, no dormitory, no scholarship, tuition is expensive).

Zhejiang University College of Engineering

The College of Engineering places more emphasis on projects and competitions than on rankings, so rk1 was not admitted, and both summer camp and pre-recommendation exemptions were rejected.

Zhesoft

You can only apply for one summer camp at Zhejiang University, but you were rejected by the School of Engineering just one day before the registration deadline for Zhejiang Soft University, and you were still able to change your choice, so you quickly changed your choice to Zhejiang Soft School.

Zhejiang Software has a regular computer test on the first day and interviews on the second day, and the proportion of computer tests is very large. If you do well in the computer test, you will be basically stable. There are three questions in the computer test. All three questions are based on the same background. Each question has a few conditions changed, and then the code is written and submitted on OJ. There is no limit on the number of submissions for each question, but only the score of the last submission is recorded and there is a real-time ranking. After I finished the exam, I discovered that there were errors in my subsequent submissions, which caused my scores to become lower.

For the original questions of the computer-based test, you can refer to the content in this article [2023 (2024) Late Nine Ultra-Low Rank No Scientific Research Guarantee Experience Poster] (https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/659128385)

During the interview, I was asked about the principle of SVM in the professional class, why it should be converted into a dual problem, how to optimize SVM, what is a convex function and how to judge a convex function. The rest is to introduce the project, torture the details of the project, and say that my project is too simple, a bit like a big homework...

The computer test was actually not too difficult. There were about 60 people with perfect scores. Unfortunately, I still didn’t do well in the computer test. As a result, I was still on the waiting list and Zhejiang Software was over.

929 Baoyan Spring Festival Gala

The 929 Baoyan Spring Festival Gala was super lively, with many talented teachers being pigeonholed + many schools suddenly had a lot of engineering master's degrees that were not fully recruited + the group's real-time broadcast of each school's candidate progress. For example, in the group of the University of Science and Technology of China, a doctor's spot in a joint training program with Tencent was suddenly taken away, and people were urgently recruited. Fudan's engineering master's degree program sends us messages every other day saying there are still places available and he hopes everyone can sign up. In addition, NTU's engineering master's degree students have all arranged interviews in October. Isn't it just a matter of clicking and sending them at this time? ? ?

929 is really a game for the brave!

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