Hello Guys, This is S.Vignesh, and I am currently doing my final year in Electronics and Communication Engineering in the SRM Vadapalani campus. A while back, I got placed as a Programmer at AthenaHealth. I’m gonna share information about the complete process behind it and also share my experiences and thoughts on them. But first, a little about the organization.

AthenaHealth is a company which provides cloud-based services for EHR, practice management and care coordination. Their main clients are big hospitals who face the daunting task of handling patient records and also paperwork regarding medical insurances that might be covering the patients. AthenaHealth simplifies this process with their software products which is popular across major hospitals in the USA. The company is headquartered at Watertown, New Jersey, USA with the chennai office being their only outsourced branch.

Now, for the interview process itself. The complete process spanned two days and consisted of four rounds.

Day 1:

The day started with all of us assembling at the Campus auditorium at 10 AM where the pre-placement talk about the company was presented. They started with a story about two men who started a birthing center but were faced with the challenges of handling thousands of paperwork, primarily regarding the insurance payout, and how they spent most of the time just trying to get paid. That’s actually the story about the co-founders of athenahealth and that’s how the company was started. They went on to give a brief explanation about the various products they provide to the clients.

The Written Aptitude Test (The First Round) :

The first round was the aptitude test (as it is the case for most) and had just ten questions and we were given forty minutes to solve them. That might seem an awful lot of time for just a handful of questions but oh trust me people. I couldn’t solve some of them. In fact I don’t know a single person who solved all ten. If anybody did and you’re reading this, please comment below, because you sir are a boss.

The Programming Round (The Second Round)

Right after the first round, all of us had to attend the pre-placement talk given by Cognizant, which gave them enough time to evaluate our papers. The CTS pre-placement ended, and we headed for lunch. But before i could have my first bite, I got a call from a classmate that I had gotten through to the next round. I’m not aware of how many were shortlisted from the initial 2000 odd people who wrote the aptitude test, but the rest of us went to the Tech Park for the second round of the recruitment process, the programming round. We were instructed to code in C++ in the TURBOC program and were each handed out a question paper which had just two program questions. The first one was deleting duplicate entries in an array. The second program was a tougher one, a program so tough, I don’t recall that now. We were given an hour and a half to program that and were asked to save the file so that they could evaluate it later. Almost none of us could complete both the programs in the given time, but then again, I don’t know anyone who got the answers for both the questions. Again, please, comment.

The results for the second round came at 10PM in the night through mail. Out of I-Don’t-Know-How-Many-People, only 10 had been shortlisted. TEN. Your chances were pretty bad when you can actually count the number of people shortlisted for interview with your fingers. TEN. But hey, that’s not all. I was the only one from ECE. Your chances were even worse when you could count the number of people from your stream with your nose. Especially when you were going to attend an interview for a Software based company, with a bunch of CSE people. And i was yet to print out my resume.

Did I mention the interview was at the athenahealth offices in Kanthanchavadi? Yeah.

DAY 2: THE INTERVIEWS

My reporting time was at 10. It was raining the previous night, so I knew I had to start early. So i started at 8 from my place. That did not help, especially since I had the navigation skills of a three year old. I finally reached the tech Park at which the office was located at 10. I rushed to the office located at the top most floor in one of the blocks. I arrived at the athenahealth corporate office short of breath and sweaty. Wrong office.

Apparently, the interview was in the other block. Lucky me. Finally after all the hassle, I reached the right office only to find out that I was the first one there. The athenahealth office was pretty impressive. The decor and the atmosphere was pretty fun and gave a good vibe.

Later once everyone arrived, at around 11:30AM we were asked to wait in a room reminiscent of classrooms as they called us out one by one for the technical interview. Each interview took place for around one hour, and by what the kattangulathur people were discussing, there were two sets of panelists. My name was later called out as the third.

Since I was from an ECE background, I was mostly asked questions about electronic devices, training courses I attended in various organizations, and a couple of other things in my resume. Also, to test my programming skills, I was asked to write programs simulating the behavior of electronic components such as diodes, Transistors, etc. The interview went on for only twenty minutes, as opposed to the sixty for the rest of the people. At this point, the only thing running on my mind was that I had plenty of time to meet my friends in college if I left then, or rather they asked me to leave.

1:30PM – They provided all the candidates with free lunch from the canteen. It wasn’t so bad. The process continued at 2PM as they continued calling each one.

3:00PM – All the interviews were over by now. They shifted us to a conference room and called out one of the candidates. He came back after ten minutes and said that he had been asked to go home and that they were gonna have additional technical rounds for the rest of us. Great. After ten minutes, they called my name out and asked me to sit in an empty conference room and wait for the HR manager. Cool, that meant I could still reach college to meet my friends.

4:00PM – No sign of the HR manager. The room was still empty. I was asked to fill out a form with my details. I was as confused as you are not right now.

5:00PM – Still waiting. It was so cold in the room, I wished I had the remote to the Air conditioning. To make things worse, my phone battery died. So cold, so alone.

5:30PM – Waiting. I could see people – both staff and a few of the candidates, moving outside from the glass walls of the conference room. They were in fact having additional technical rounds. Later, a couple of staff members came to the conference room and told me that they had booked that room for work, so they wanted me to occupy the smaller room opposite the conference room I was in. Good thing I wasn’t claustrophobic.

6:00PM – Still here. Still alone. Lesser people moving around. Still couldn’t find the meaning of life and the purpose of existence.

6:30PM – I think the working staff were leaving by now. I could see one of the interviews taking place in the room opposite mine. But still, no word on my situation here. By now, I was certain that Ninja Storm was the best Power Rangers show till now.

6:45 PM – Finally! They call me in for the HR interview. One panelist, two candidates. It was a quick one and not a lot of questions were asked. Just the usual ones they teach us at training. Finally they broke it to us that we were selected and explained to us about the pay. Also, they offered to provide us an optional internship starting from January. And that was the end of the whole process.