I had my interview process with Cognizant, and it started with an online aptitude and coding test. The test included questions from quantitative aptitude, logical reasoning, and verbal ability. Along with that, there were two coding problems—one was based on arrays (finding the second largest element), and the other was on strings (checking whether a string is a palindrome). The overall difficulty of this round was easy to moderate. After clearing the test, I was invited for the technical interview. The interviewer began by asking me to introduce myself and then moved on to questions about my final year project. They asked me to explain the difference between C and C++, the concept of normalization in DBMS, and to write an SQL query to fetch the second highest salary from an employee table. I was also asked about the four main OOPS concepts—encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, and abstraction. Towards the end, I was given a simple coding exercise to swap two numbers without using a third variable. The interviewer was quite approachable and even guided me when I was stuck.