Morgan Stanley Interview Experience for Summer Technology Analyst
Interview Experience
I applied on the careers page without any referral in October 2023. My resume was shortlisted and I received the mail for the Online Assessment on 12th February 2024. Round-1 (Online...
Full Details
I applied on the careers page without any referral in October 2023. My resume was shortlisted and I received the mail for the Online Assessment on 12th February 2024.
Round-1 (Online Assessment)
I gave my Online Assessment on 15th February. It comprised of 3 sections :
Debugging Section: Debugging questions and time to solve was 20 mins. One can choose any programming language for debugging and the section was quite easy and one has a basic understanding of programming that can easily debug the questions.
Aptitude Section: Aptitude Section which had 10 questions to be solved in 20 mins. The difficulty level of the questions was easy to moderate.
Coding Section: This was the coding question having 3 Programming questions. The difficulty level was Leetcode Easy-Medium. I have provided the link for 2 of the questions:
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/merging-intervals/
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/level-order-tree-traversal/ I was able to solve all the 3 coding questions and the debugging and the aptitude section also went well.
Round-2 (Technical Interview)
The next day(on 16th February), I got a call from HR that I had cleared the Online Assessment and that my Interview was scheduled after 4 days on 20th February at 2 PM.
It was a Zoom call that lasted for over 60 minutes.
There were two interviews.
They were friendly.
They made me feel comfortable.
First, they asked me to introduce myself.
Then they jumped over to SQL queries.
They asked me 9-10 SQL queries.
I was prepared for it and hence I was able to write the SQL queries correctly for almost all the questions.
The interviewers were satisfied with it.
Then they asked me a question on C programming.
They gave me a piece of code void func(){ int arr[10];}
They told me that this function is being called recursively infinite number of times and I have a memory of 2 Mega Bytes.
Then he asked me if this would give an error if it would keep on running infinite times or if my system would crash.
I was able to answer this question and the interviewer was also satisfied with it.
Then they asked me the difference between \u201Ccall by value\u201D and \u201Ccall by reference\u201D and asked me to explain it using an example.
Then they asked me a medium-level DSA question for which I was able to provide the logic and wrote the pseudo-code for the same.
The interviewers were happy with my approach. In the end, they asked me if I had any questions and the interview ended.
Round-3 (HR Round)
I got a call from HR the very next day(on 21st February) that I got a positive response from the panel and I had my HR Round Scheduled on 22nd Feb.
I read all the past interview experiences of the HR round of Morgan Stanley.
I read about the company and the core values of the company.
I also prepared for some behavioural questions.
It was again a Zoom call.
The interviewer joined late and straightaway asked me to introduce myself.
Then he asked me about the project that I had mentioned in my resume.
He asked why had used MongoDB over SQL database.
Then he asked me some behavioural questions:
What are your aspirations and career plans?
Why do you want to join Morgan Stanley?
What do you know about the business side of Morgan Stanley?
Core values of Morgan Stanley?
There are two teams, one working on Python and the other working on C++, which team you prefer to join and why?
Give a scenario where you had to sacrifice your ethics.
Tell an interesting incident related to your project.
Given a scenario where you are working on a team and you have to deliver a product in one month\u2019s deadline to a client but some bugs in the project hypothetically can\u2019t be removed in one month, you have two options \u2013 either to deliver the product late or to deliver a product full of bugs, what will you do?
The interview lasted for about 30 minutes. The interviewer asked me if I had any questions and it ended.
After exactly 3 weeks, I received an email that I had been shortlisted for the Summer Analyst role at Morgan Stanley for the Summer of 2024.
Tips: Be patient and keep believing in yourself. Don\u2019t forget to read past interview experiences before your interview.
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About Morgan Stanley Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Morgan Stanley. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Morgan Stanley are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Morgan Stanley interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Morgan Stanley reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Morgan Stanley Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Morgan Stanley reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.