Mohammed Anas Shaikh
(Note: This is supposed to be an informal advice piece where I adopt a more friendly conversational tone about careers aimed at easing new students into the preparation mindset. This is just one experience of the several paths that are available and not meant to cast in stone anything about the outcomes that I have gotten. It is an indicative piece but not curative in any way. Aimed at being a good starting point, but nowhere close to being the be all, end all about anything. Always take feedback from your institute, your peers, your parents, and if possible, a career counsellor. And don’t forget the counsel of the wisest being of them all: your gut)
Hello folks! My name is Mohammed Anas Shaikh, a student from the class of 2016 batch of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Indore. Cliched as it might sound, it feels like it was yesterday when I was in your shoes, starry eyed with ambition but cautious about my career plans, anxious about any faux paus. It’s a little hard to digest that I am an alumnus already, for an institute that taught me so much, opened so many doors, it’s hard to distance myself from it. I was able to prepare for CAT 2015 and secured an admit to IIM Calcutta amongst others, from where I pursued where Post Graduate Diploma in Management (equivalent to an MBA) and from where I was finally placed as a Technology Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers India (PwC India). To be honest, there are several different career paths that you can take from where you are at the moment in the institute, and the sky’s the limit, and this little piece is my attempt to break down my career selection process for you.
As a student at IIT Indore, I was academically good and ended my course with a CGPA of 8.52/10 and was ranked 2nd in my department. My advice with regards to academics is simple, please take it seriously. You didn’t come so far by cracking JEE to only come this far. You earned an admission to one of the best institutes in the country, please make the most of it. At IIM Calcutta, I paid the price by not taking academics seriously in my first term, but worked hard to catch up, ultimately ending with CGPA of 7.08/9, ranked 53 in a batch of nearly 450 students, which I could have perhaps bettered, had it not been for my negligence.
This isn’t to say I wasn’t involved in extracurriculars. I was a part of the Literary Club and a founding member of the Quiz Club as well at IIT Indore. This continued on in Calcutta where I was the Events Head for the Quiz Club and the Web & PR Head for the Literary Club. I was also involved in Fluxus, handling a few standalone events during the Fest. My advice for you regarding Extra-Curriculars is that it would be a great place to cultivate your own personality and hobbies, beyond what we call the usual routine academics or work activities. It will help you evaluate yourself, develop skills such as public speaking, all within the secure boundaries of the institute. Nothing to lose, everything to gain. Plus, from a placement point of view, for candidates placed equally in other requests, the clinching factor can be extra-curriculars. A well-rounded person can be trusted to work better and take decisions better. So, take the plunge. Carpe Diem! Take up the performing arts, event management, the fine arts, and whatnot, the choice is yours! It’s college, be your own person!
One of my fondest memories would perhaps be winning the Spell Bee competition over 50+ other competitors at IIT Bombay during their fest, Mood Indigo in Dec 2012. Looking back, it was perhaps not the biggest competition of its kind, and ever since, I met people who had their own way with words, far better than my own command over them. What it did do for me was instill a tremendous amount of confidence in me and taught me to go out of my way to take on new opportunities regardless of their size, since what started as a simple participation in a large college fest, ended up as a win for me!
Yes, I am aware of that underlying conundrum, the elephant in the room, the usually well-intentioned but more often than not snide questions, Why MBA? After Engineering? After IIT? As a fresher? Immerse yourself in your core field first etc. etc. etc. That decision/dilemma and how I navigated it can be a discussion for another time.
As I have already mentioned earlier, I am currently working as a Technology Consultant in SAP platform, implementing the Banking/Treasury modules for NBFCs (non-banking financial companies). As a student at Calcutta, I had always aimed for a position in the consulting sector, serving in a competitive B2B environment where I would be in charge of delivering results to an ever changing set of clients facing their own set of different problems and providing tailor made solutions to them for solving their problems. Problem-solving, therein lies the underlying idea behind consulting. You get to be the expert and create a custom tailor-made solution that gets the client their desired results. Be warned though, the problems at play are those that are often intractable, unmoved by the clients own team and do not have readymade solutions, and given their complexity, often involve a lot of hands on work with data points, the stakeholders and often research on your part as well, as you wrestle and tussle with Hydra-like problems take, in management, and specifically in my case, a technology platform.
Preparation for this involves being thorough with your management basics, your own profile, and to an extent, the act of selling. And case interviews, you are given problem statements to solve on the basis of limited data. The challenge is to identify the core problem at hand, and suggest steps to mitigate, adapt, resolve or reroute the problem into a different opportunity. If interested, I would recommend you to watch the Victor Cheng series on cracking case interviews for a good primer as to consulting. However, my interview, since it was primarily involved for a Technology Consulting role, revolved more around my own profile and the act of making the sale itself, rather than case interviews which is the primary selection process for Management Consulting.
The selection process began with the usual shortlisting of the CVs (please take a great deal of effort and care in writing your CV, it is your first contact with your employer, if interested, I can discuss this separately for your benefit). The first interview was a pitch for my profile to the interviewer, or basically, an exercise in selling. The second interview was with a Partner leading the Data & Analytics practice at PwC where I was grilled on my profile, my case competitions and the like. Finally, I had a round with the HR for a personality evaluation and to judge a cultural fit with the firm. The process lasted about 45 minutes to about an hour.
What does a day in my job look like? To begin with, I have a session with my manager to decide pressing issues for the day and a systematic plan for things under process, or to be taken up in the coming day(s). I might be required to deliver a new program to my client for which, I would begin with an understanding of what is the exact business requirement at hand (the Business Blueprint or the BBP). You can think of this as a description of the black box that the client wants. For example, the client might need a dashboard to track all the clauses in a particular loan contract with their borrower, along with quantitative targets (if any) and their respective deadlines. Then I would translate this into a Functional Specification, wherein, I translate this business process into a basic program specification (from a business as well as technical point of view), setting the logic, the expected domain of inputs & in certain cases the range of outputs. You can think of it as understanding and delineating the contents and processes of the black box and how it performs these activities. Finally, the programmer working with me writes the actual code involved in the black box and also sets up Technical Specification which notes all the functions, and code routines involved in performing this activity. After this development testing is completed, the program in iteratively tested, first in basic hands on Unit Test (UT) in the development system (where the code was built), then in a more through User Acceptability Test (UAT) in the quality system (where there is a Quality test with sample data) and finally taken to the production system (which is the live system where users operate, note that you cannot let defects pass into the production system). This is a simple representation of a development cycle. Alternatively, if I am working on an already live system (a system under use), and the user faces any unforeseen/critical issues, then I would also be expected to work as firefighter and solve the problem as well, breaking it into parts to understand the core issue or debugging the code if needed. Of course, this is just how processes take place and this is not to imply that an entire cycle takes place in a day (it can, for a minor development and based on the skill of the programmer and functional consultant, that is me).
As for leisure, I greatly enjoy reading and quizzing (isn’t that already clear from the Literary Club and Quiz Club participation? ). I have a very keen interest in the humanities, especially western philosophy, sociology, history and political science — you can hit me up any day to have a discussion on these! I also enjoy technology and how it can change our economy and the way we operate.
That’s it from my side folks! In this short writeup, I have tried to tell you about my career path and how I went about it. All the best! College days are nothing short of our own stories of coming of age, with all the endless possibilities, the anxiety filled expectations, the fearful looming of failure, and the little chances daily to reclaim victory with measured self-discipline, effort and sincerity. I was there once, and let me tell you, everything will be alright. All you need to worry is about how hard you worked today and how much further you have moved towards your goal. The world is your oyster friends! Go out there and claim what you are!
You can connect with me on LinkedIn or Facebook and we can have a chat about anything under the sun! I might be slow and unresponsive at times, but I will definitely try getting back to you.
