Education : Tier 4 college in southern India, BE CSE(grad year -> 2023), cgpa > 7

Experience: 3 internships : 2 unpaid student startups, one non MAANG product based company

Application process :
Around the month of June, I noticed an opening for a full time SWE role for 2023. I was able to get a referral from a current employee whom I contacted through a common Slack community(that person was a DSA instructor for a series of classes and immediately agreed to give me a referral. Bless her, it was the easiest referral for me lol). However, that post closed down. When you get a referral in Google, you can apply for three jobs within a month. Later when there was an opening for internship, I applied.
Within two months, I got a mail stating that your application is shortlisted for interview process.

Note : For an internship, you only have two technical interviews(no OA's). Post that, you have a host matching round and after that you may or may not have a behavioural round.

The day after the mail, I got a direct call from a HR asking me to schedule my interview dates in the next two weeks. Also, there was a google meet scheduled with all the students to be interviewed with the head of campus team and a current employee. They discussed about the process and answered all the questions. There were around 100 students, both selected from campus and off campus for the interview process.

Interview process : I scheduled both my interviews on the same day.

Note : You can proceed to the second round only if you clear the first round

Round 1 : A female SWE joined the call. She said hi and directly jumped to the question. For Google interviews, theres an online document link shared in your mail which gives you a whiteboard like environment and you can set your favourite programming language. You and your interviewer can both edit it at the same time.
The question in this round was a super simple, generic interviewer question. I recognised it immediately. I thought out loud, split the question into simple halves, formed an algorithm to solve it by going over the brute force solution, discussed the TC and SC. When she gave me the green signal, I came up with the optimal one. This took up some 15 mins. When I started coding, I did some mistakes here and there while doing it. She gave me a lot of hints. Finally, I was able to come up with the right answer and dry ran it with the testcases. I immediately answered the edge and corner cases. This left us a good amount of time remaining. I was able to ask her questions about Google. She answered me and was quite friendly. I was given the green signal to proceed to the next round.

Round 2 : It happened in the same day in the afternoon. This interviewer started with a small introduction(from my side) and he then jumped on to the question. This question was medium at best or a little bit hard. Here too, I followed almost the same approach. Explained my ideas, built up the algorithm. Here , the interviewer was interested in the coding part. My confidence was a little bit shaky, so I did a lot of mistakes. However, the interviewer was super helpful and helped me correct my mistakes. Also, this is not a generic interview question and I haven't found in leetcode or codechef(maybe it is there in codeforces but I dont know).I recieved the feedback at the same interview that if I had corrected some of my mistakes, I would have made it.

Overall, even though I was rejected, I felt a deep level of satisfaction. The interview process was fast, direct and the best thing was I recieved my feedback then and there. As a bonus point, I had friendly interviewers who helped to see where I went wrong. This is one of my best interview experiences and I had no regret, only hope and encouragement to try for Google again after my cooldown period next year.