# Application Last Stage: The Interview

### 25 November 2018

• Keywords:
• oxford
• application

Shiri Avni

Having already written about the take-home assignment and the personal statement part of the interview process for the computer science MSc, the last step of the application is an online interview. The interview lasts about 40 minutes, and is comparable to the take-home assignment. Prior to the interview, I had prepared personal answers in expectation of getting questions about my CV, but the questions were in fact standard, non-personal ones:

2. Question about providing an algorithm for graphs, with a follow-up about the time and space complexity of the solution. Don’t recall the details, but but it simply required being able to tweak the Breadth First Search algorithm.
3. Simple recursion problem: Given that you are at point $n$ and you need to get to $0$, in how many ways can you do so provided that you can only make jumps of 1 or 3 steps at a time?

This is a standard problem reminiscent of fibonnaci:

Factor in the base cases to ensure the recursion halts and you’re done.

Afterwards, I was asked to transform my solution to a dynamic progamming version and to memoization. Lastly, I needed to provide the pros and cons of each.