22 hours ago

papa 420

Hyderabad

okay so i'll be honest - i walked in completely underestimating this.

tensor school felt like one of those new age colleges where if you're reasonably smart and can hold a conversation you probably get through. i'd heard about it, filled the application, wrote a decent personal statement and thought okay i'm probably fine.

i was not fine. 3 out of 36 got selected. i was not one of them.

here's everything that happened.

the venue

they called us to IIIT Hyderabad campus for the interview. if you're from Hyderabad you know the energy of that place - everyone around you is doing something serious. we were 36 students sitting in a common room through the afternoon, getting called one by one. each time someone returned you'd glance at their face trying to figure out how it went. nobody said much. we all just waited.

at 6pm they brought all 36 of us back together.

Manas sir - founder and CEO of AlgoUniversity and Tensor School, CS from IIIT Hyderabad - stood up, said a few words about what they were looking for, and called out 3 names. those 3 walked up. he personally handed them their offer letters right there in that room.

33 of us watched.

i was part of the 33. got waitlisted.

that room at 6pm is not something i'll forget quickly.

who interviewed me

two separate panels. Manas sir in one, Sarigama in the other. both CS from IIIT Hyderabad, Sarigama is a 2x founder. these are not people reading questions off a sheet. they have built actual things and they can immediately see the difference between someone who genuinely understands something and someone who has just rehearsed an answer about it.

what the interview was like

single round, 50-60 minutes, one shot.

started with background and personal statement. felt conversational at first but they go deep quickly. i had written about being fascinated by how search engines work and the follow up questions made me realise i had written it to sound good rather than because i had actually thought about it deeply. whatever you put in your personal statement - actually think it through before you go in.

then they asked me to think of a real problem from my daily life that i'd want to solve using technology. not a textbook problem, something i've actually experienced. we're class 12 students, nobody expects you to know how to code or build anything yet. they just want to see if you can think about a problem clearly - what's broken, who it affects, how technology could help. i gave an answer but i stayed too surface level. they kept pushing me to think deeper about it and i didn't have much more to say. that part could have gone better.

then puzzles.

first one - 11 compartments. thief hiding in one of 11 train compartments, moves to an adjacent one after every check, you can check one compartment at a time. what's the minimum number of checks to guarantee catching him?

you need a sweep strategy that accounts for the thief starting in an even or odd compartment separately. i got the direction but couldn't work out the complete logic. got helped through the second half.

second one - 1000 bottles of wine, one poisoned, 10 rats, 24 hours, single round of testing. find the poisoned bottle.

the answer is binary. assign every bottle a 10 digit binary number. each rat represents one bit position. every rat drinks from all bottles that have a 1 in its position. after 24 hours the rats that die form the binary number of the poisoned bottle. 2 to the power of 10 is 1024 so it covers all 1000 bottles comfortably.

i got there after a hint. "think in powers of 2" is what Manas sir said. clicked immediately after that but the hint was needed.

the part most people don't prepare for

right at the end - why tensor school, what do you know about us, why should we pick you.

i treated these as cooldown questions. easy ones to end on. that was a mistake.

they are checking something very specific here - whether you actually understand what tensor school is trying to be and whether you genuinely belong in the class they are building. a generic answer about being passionate about AI does not land in that room. it just doesn't.

what actually matters:

• why tensor school - understand the first principles approach, understand who built it and what they built before, have a reason that connects to your actual story
• what do you know about us - know that 3 people got selected in front of 33 others on the same day. know that this is not seat filling. know what you're actually signing up for
• why you - skip the adjectives entirely. give them one specific thing from your life that shows how you think. one real example beats ten good sounding words every time

what i took home

the students who got selected that day - you could sense something different about them even in the waiting room. not louder or more confident. just more settled in how they were thinking. that's what tensor school is selecting for and it's not something you can fake for 60 minutes in front of people who know exactly what it looks like.

i'm going to spend the next few months actually building that way of thinking.

reapplying next cycle.

if you're preparing - don't make my mistake of treating it like a formality. 3 out of 36 happened in real life, in a room, in front of everyone. go in ready.

all the best 🙏