About D. E. Shaw’s Desis Ascend Educare 2021

Shivangi
4 min readOct 20, 2021

The Desis Ascend Educare is a 6-month long training program by D. E. Shaw India for women engineering students passionate about tech.

You can find the official brochure here.

Eligibility: There are 2 different cohorts, one for 2nd-year students, and another for 3rd-year students. Out of 6,200+ applicants, 40 students were selected from the 3rd year and 35 students from the 2nd year.

Application Process: The applications opened around August 2021, and the entire process took about 2 months. There were mainly 4 rounds, summarised as follows:

Round 1: Complete application involving Resume + Essay + questions about JEE ranks and BITSAT scores.

Round 2: Coding round on Hackerrank platform. The level of difficulty was medium-level, involving questions from heaps and dynamic programming.

Round 3: Personal interview round. This is like an HR round where they asked behavioral questions and how we would manage this program alongside the college curriculum.

Round 4: Technical interview round. This was a video call on Hackerrank where I was asked 3 questions from the topics hashing, OOPs, dynamic programming, and trees. I was required to write complete code for 2 of them. After I wrote the code, the interviewer ran my code on all the test cases on the Hackerrank platform itself.

Experience and Perks:

We had our first meet last week and they said we would get a chance to visit their office if covid is better by March 2022 :D.

Got our welcome swags, and I absolutely love them!

I Will update the rest after 6 months :)

Update 1 (3rd Nov, 2021): Diwali gifts!

Update 2 (17th Dec, 2021): D.E.Shaw’s 25 Anniversary event!

Had such a good time!! ♥️

Update 3 (Jan 13th, 2022): My Birthday :-)

Update 4 (Feb 3rd, 2022): New Year swags arrived!

Update 5 (29th April, 2022): My team ‘StockWatch’ bagged 3rd place in the group project competition!

3rd position in group project!

The top 3 teams will be given exciting goodies :)

Prizes for group project

My team consisted of 5 members, and we worked on building a stock exchange from scratch, which was backend-heavy. We were given about a month for the project, after which we has to submit a report, Github repository, and give a 30-minute presentation to senior leaders at D. E. Shaw!

Update 6 (5th May, 2022): Prize for the team project arrived!

Update 7 (21st July, 2022): Received Rs. 49,000/- as part of the program!

For more opportunities, check: https://linktr.ee/shivangitomar

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