Placements through the DSC lens
Part three of a three-part series.
QUARANTINE! We’ve been using that word an awful lot lately. For most people like me stuck at home quarantine-ing, hailing from the same breed (for the lack of a better word), you know the breed — an engineering student, struck with a preponed summer break, with no certainty of the future, applying for internships left and right only to be met with rejections because of hiring freezes, the pressure to acquire an internship and eventually a job that too with your own merit is a little frustrating. Desperate for some inspiration, I looked to my very own seniors from DSC VIT, who took the plunge on their own, went the road less travelled and charted their own course! You guessed it right, they opted for off-campus placements, and succeeded!
Read up as they share their experiences!
Samarth Nayyar — Community Lead at DSC VIT
1. Where are you placed, what is your profile and what is your package?
I am currently working at MakeMyTrip under the GoIbibo team. My profile is “User Experience Designer”. Currently, I am working as an intern my package will be discussed with me a few weeks before my full-time employment conversion. Generally, it is around 10 to 16 lakhs per annum.
2. How did you approach companies that weren’t on campus?
There are various ways you can reach out to companies that are not on campus, and all of this is a continuous process that needs to be done over a long time.
First is making sure you have a proper contact list of people you know in the field that you are applying for. How do you make these contacts? You go to events, you reach out to people on LinkedIn from posts and hit up people on various networks. Your contact circle of your friends and acquaintances can also help you connect with people.
Keep in touch with people and don’t be shy to start a conversation, the more the people you talk to the larger your channel of information for opportunities.
Keep working on projects with companies on the side, this increases your credibility. These are the connections that can come back to help you.
Make a list of top 10 to 20 companies you admire and wish to work at, keep a constant check on the career pages of these companies, working for them really helps you align your aims.
LinkedIn (especially), Shine, Monster, Naukri and every other job search platform should be like your Instagram, scroll through them every day.
3. What did your interview entail?
I had three interviews primarily, one HR and 2 Technical ones.
The first interview was the HR interview in which I was asked what I currently do and what my qualifications are, this is where they ask questions based on your resume but these questions are general.
Following this was a technical interview where the Design Manager of MakeMyTrip talked to me on a personal level understanding the projects I have done before and going into detail about one specific project to see what my process of work is like.
A task was given to me, followed by a final interview discussing the task and seeing my work. They pointed out where they feel it could be improved and I was told the ups and downs of the design process in the company and how I could be better aligned with it.
4. How did you prepare for all the rounds
In general for off-campus placements, talent is greater than anything. So when people apply they apply for a field they love and want to pursue for their foreseeable future. Hence, preparation in the field is up to you. The key is to be confident about your skills and you will be able to land the job of your choice.
A small research on the company and it’s design styles, with elaborate “fieldwork” of the LinkedIn profile of my interviewer helped me align my answers better to the expectations of the company.
5. What made you gain an edge over other applicants?
Again, having done research on the company and the interviewer helped me immensely in this process. My biggest strength was being a part of various communities throughout my school and college time, I was constantly involved in projects either as a part of the action or in a higher delegation role. This really helped me understand the flow of work, which helped me shape my interview answers in a more mature stand.
6. How much coding knowledge should you have and in which language?
Well for my field which is design, coding is generally not even touched upon in interviews but having a basic knowledge of web development, app development and backend structures really helped me give answers which surprised the interviewers.
In terms of design, it’s good to know 2 to 3 different tools and different styles so that the interviewer understand that you can translate from one tool to another with ease if that’s required.
7. How important is your CGPA to the whole selection process?
Whether or not your CGPA matters, depends largely on the role you are applying for. While I maintained an 8.0 CGPA throughout college, which was mentioned in my resume, it was not brought up in interviews even once.
8. How did you deal with last-minute nervousness before the interview?
Nervousness is part of the interview and no one, not even a 10-year experienced person can get rid of it 100%. Just make sure you have knowledge of the company and its interviewer. A little research will help you soften it as you already know the person you are talking to.
Be yourself and just keep one thing out of your mind, no one is judging your character or skills. This will just help you improve.
9. How did you decide between higher studies and sitting for placements?
Higher studies have always been on my mind. It’s something I want to do in a couple of years. But a better arsenal of experiences lands you a better university than what you would land without it. A small amount of corporate experience also helps you understand what this field is actually all about and then you can make a better decision of your higher studies field, maybe choose a more direct field related to a more specific interest.
Ayush Priya — Technical Lead at DSC VIT
1. Where are you placed, what is your profile and what is your package?
I am placed at a Cyber Security Firm, Appsecco, as a DevSecOps Engineer. As for the package, I’m not at the liberty to discuss that, unfortunately.
2. How did you approach companies that weren’t on campus?
This was a methodical process where —
I would look for companies that I found could be potential matches as per my preferences.
Then I would find people working in those companies on LinkedIn and connect with them with a message about why I am connecting with them. This included a brief about myself, my skills, why I think I am a suitable hire for them and their organization, along with my resume.
This worked great in two ways,
- I did not have to remember about the people who I was approaching for a job as if I would have waited to send them the message after they connected, I’d have to keep track of these people.
- Secondly, it helped by filtering people who could not help me as they’d either reject the request or point me to someone who could, in both cases the process was fast-tracked.
The ultimate goal of finding a job on your own from avenues other than on-campus placements is to find the companies that lie in the intersection of companies that you want to work for and companies where you’d be a potentially good hire because only then it makes sense for both parties involved to take the application forward.
3. How was the selection process different from on-campus placements?
First off, the process of getting in touch with a company itself is vastly different.
Unlike on-campus placements, where the companies approach you with an intent to hire when one is trying to get placed off-campus it is the responsibility of the individual to make his or her case about why he would be a good fit for the company.
This is one of the most difficult bits to take care of because this is the first step, if at any point the point-of-contact for the company feels that you are not worth hiring, the conversation ends. Here, it is important to realize the fact the need for a constant effort on the individual’s end to justify to the company why he is a suitable hire because the pool for talent in off-campus placements is a lot bigger than the segment of students sitting in an on-campus scenario. This pool of talent is also invisible to each applicant which makes it rather difficult to judge where one stands.
One other difference is that many companies prefer applicants to complete some task(s). These tasks are mostly derived from the work that would be entailed as part of the role the application is for. A question that some people have asked me is whether DSA is important in off-campus placements as the companies give out tasks instead of coding challenges. To this, I’d say, it depends but many companies would still ask questions based on DSA, mostly during the interviews.
However, off-campus interviews are focused on the role being applied for hence, DSA based problem solving is never completely out of the scope (especially for freshers interviewing for their first job) but one could anticipate if a certain role requires it or not and prepare accordingly.
4. What did your interview entail?
The company I’m working with right now is where I had interned once before as a Security Engineer and because of that, they knew me. When I approached them about joining them as a full-time employee, most of the calls we had were more of a discussion about objectives, what I expect out of the company, the role and what would be expected out of me. This was not just because they knew me or that I am exceptionally good for the role I applied.
Appsecco, according to me, firmly believes that a motivated individual who is keen on learning can be trained into learning the relevant skills provided he has a base of understanding about the subject.
Also, after I received a confirmation from them, we had multiple calls where we discussed what I could start learning, tasks that I should be work on, potential additions to the completed tasks, reviews on how a particular approach I took could be made better and so forth.
5. How did you prepare for all the rounds?
The answer depends on what this question means by the word ‘prepare’. If it talks about did I study DSA, I didn’t. If it means did I solve competitive programming questions on online platforms, I didn’t. If it, in any way, means the traditional preparation that goes around campus placements such as studying DSA/DBMS/OS/NetComm, practising problem-solving on competitive coding platforms, attending mock interviews, I didn’t prepare at all.
However, if it means did I acquire the required skills for the role I wanted, yes I did. For the entirety of my years in college, I spent the vast majority of my time picking up skills relevant to security and development. I worked on various projects in different contexts to understand the various aspects involved in the development of an application.
Learning development was not by accident, it was something I did so I could grasp how software development works and working in teams also elucidated on how a team goes about building software. Understanding how something works helps tremendously when you want to break it.
Most of the questions I received in the interviews or as tasks, were based on real-world scenarios, which was something I learned from developing software solutions, It isn’t something that I picked from a book/course a few months prior to starting my applications for the companies.
All the work I did in college over approximately 4 years started to come together towards the end when I scored a job as a DevSecOps Engineer which encompassed all my interests.
So, in a way, I had been preparing for the rounds since the start of college.
6. What made you gain an edge over other applicants?
This question is honestly not something that I can answer accurately because of the fact that for the majority of the places I applied to, I do not have any information about the rest of the candidates and how my performance was relative to them. For the applications I was selected for, I do not know how much better I am from the ones who didn’t make it and for the one I was rejected, I do not know where the other candidates beat me.
The only thing I could say here is that there’s a need for a certain sense of balance needed to proceed in interviews where one is completely oblivious about the competition.
The balance between feeling too confident when one gets through a selection round and feeling dejected when one doesn’t.
For me, when I cleared a stage I used to constantly remind myself that there’s always a chance of another candidate beating me in the next round and when I was rejected, I made sure of consoling myself about the things I have achieved in college which helped me gain the confidence needed to work further towards other avenues.
7. How much coding knowledge should you have and in which language?
The phrase ‘coding knowledge’ is not a proper quantifiable measure according to me. I prefer to measure skills based on if a person can come up with a potential solution to a problem statement. It is the difference between knowing what a particular tool does and knowing where to use the tool. Knowing the entire syntax for a language does not help if someone doesn’t know how to use that syntax to implement a solution. A quick test to determine if you know enough to accomplish a task is to mentally try to visualize the solution to a problem. For example, if I ask you to write a program to find the prime numbers within a range in Python and you can visualize where you would use conditionals, loops, you have enough knowledge about the basics of Python. Now, if I ask you to write a simple Python server to render a web-page and you can not visualize the approximate code in your head, you do not know enough about building back-end applications with Python.
All that I said here is however focused on development if we talk about learning DSA just for campus placements, it’s as simple as spending a couple of months repeatedly solving competitive coding questions as it’ll imprint those solutions in your brain such that when you see a particular question, you know how to write the solution for it. For the most part, it’s memorization, because truly learning about DSA will take more than just a few months before placements begin.
As for which language to choose, talking about off-campus placements, there’s the freedom to use any. I wrote all my tasks in Python, even if the tasks specify a language/framework to be used, talking to the company about using a different stack is a rather easy conversation as they care more about the solution than the tools used to build it. For campus placements, I’d suggest sticking to C/C++/Java as other languages might not be available during the technical rounds.
8. How important is your CGPA to the whole selection process?
This might just be my experience, but I was not questioned about my CGPA in most of my interviews. The companies were way more interested in understanding what I knew and whether I was a good fit for their team than the marks I had scored in college for papers that I studied the night before. In fact, in some of the interviews, the interviewers shared stories on how they flunked subjects and we’d laugh it off. But to be on the safe side, I’d suggest maintaining at least an 8-point CGPA. This is what I did and would definitely be good enough for most companies.
9. How did you deal with last-minute nervousness before the interview?
I would plug in my earphones, turn the volume to maximum and listen to Metallica. Towards the end, it became more of a ritual than a stress-buster.
10. How did you decide between higher studies and sitting for placements?
This was one of the rather easier decisions I took. I like learning but not academics, I don’t like the idea of being forced to spend my time learning things that I don’t find interest in. Among the almost 40 subjects that I went through in college I only actually liked exactly 2, there were some which I thought would be interesting but attending the classes made me feel differently. At that point, somewhere around my 2nd year, I decided that I’ll learn what I like in parallel to my job and chose placements than going for higher studies.
Some say that what I felt was because I was made to go through subjects that I didn’t relate to but a Masters in a specific domain would change this scenario. The truth is it doesn’t because even in specializations, there’s still a broad category of subjects to deal with.
Taking myself as an example, I have a keen interest in security but I don’t indulge in IoT related security which, depending on the institute I pick for my Masters, would probably be in the course. Sticking to a job allows a more focused learning approach towards the things I want to specialize in. I would explicitly mention that this is my ideology, everyone should figure the answer to this question themselves, of course taking inference from others but ultimately deciding themselves.
Yaswant Narayan — Android Developer at DSC VIT
1. Where are you placed, what is your profile and what is your package?
6 months internship — Zomato
Full time — redBus
The package cannot be disclosed
2. What did your interview entail?
Basic DSA questions and Android questions. HR round was just like a formality where they ask about my willingness for relocation and other normal questions one can expect in an HR interview.
3. When did you start preparing?
I applied for Android developer role and that does not require complex DSA so I started preparing from July (when this semester started). Since I was doing Android development for more than 2 years I didn’t especially prepare for the Android questions.
4. How did you prepare for all the rounds?
For basic DSA round, I prepared from interviewbit.com. I solved arrays, strings, stack, queue, linked list, hash map problems.
For Android questions, I revised my Android notes and went through the documentation to refresh my knowledge.
5. What made you gain an edge over other applicants?
My quality of projects and the scale that I’ve worked on have helped my profile stand out. The programming language, libraries and my adherence to best practices helped me a lot.
There wasn’t an interview without discussing the app which we made for Vellore Police Department during Parliament Election.
6. How much coding knowledge should you have and in which language?
If applying for an Android developer role then knowing to build apps in Kotlin is a must-have skill nowadays. If you do a lot of projects in Java you will be good at OOP concepts. Nowadays almost all companies ask Java and OOP concepts so I would recommend learning Java. Knowing about software architecture and design patterns helped me in my interviews. Regardless of any programming
Nowadays knowing Golang is a very good plus if you’re applying for backend roles because most of the tech companies started embracing it.
7. How important is your CGPA to the whole selection process?
For me, it did not even matter.
None of the companies I applied asked for my CGPA.
8. How daunting is the whole interview experience?
The DSA part of the interview always scares me because I feel if I don’t do it well they will lose interest in me. This is the most daunting part of my interview because I was totally into Android development for all these years in college and didn’t concentrate much on DSA.
9. How did you deal with last-minute nervousness before the interview?
To clear my mind I will watch some random funny videos on YouTube or listen to rap songs. If I feel stressed even after that I will tell myself that there are always other choices even if this doesn’t go well.
I have noticed that whenever I take an interview very seriously I become very nervous so only at the very last moment I will tell this to myself. One should be careful about this because it might make them overconfident.
10. How did you decide between higher studies and sitting for placements?
Nothing excited and motivated me more than product development. The fact that the apps I build are solving real-world problems and is being used by people peaks my interest more than researching and publishing papers.
Some people go for higher studies out of interest and some go because they didn’t get a good company here and end up in a job there. They might get a good high paying job but I wanted to work in a company where small teams work on products used by millions of people and work on things I am passionate about. Money is not my motivational factor. I was sure that I will get one or the other job here which will satisfy me so I dropped my idea of higher studies.
