A Guide for Placement Season
-Karun M. Harne
Placement season is the most important and a testing phase in IIT life. I appeared for just three interviews but it was a great learning experience. Here are some tips I would like to share with you which might be helpful. Honestly speaking your placement generally boils down to at least one of the three factors- CPI, Coding skills, Analytical skills/aptitude. CPI represents your knowledge and consistency which is generally required by core companies. Remember, once you clear the CPI cut off, everything depends upon your Interview. IT and management companies mostly look for your knowledge in coding or your analytical skills (puzzles and aptitude). If you are targeting core companies in ECE/EEE, begin revising important departmental courses at least 2–3 months before the placement season kicks off in December. Here is a short list of few must do courses — Principles of Communication, Digital Communication, DSP, Signals and Systems, Embedded Systems, Digital Circuits and Microprocessors and Analog Circuit Design. Organize a series of placement lectures, given by your batch mates, on these topics in your 7th semester. It really helps you discuss key interview questions and revise your courses effectively. Before appearing for a written/online test of a company, practice some questions that appeared in their previous tests. You can practice some standard aptitude questions. Google will help you here. Traverse the question paper before you start solving since many simple questions are deliberately placed in the end. No matter how your communication skills may be, mock GDs are necessary! Sit with a pen, paper and carefully listen and note down in short what others say and add your points to the discussion referring to previous points (you may start like “as my friend has mentioned…”). Be polite. Do not shout or add irrelevant points. If others are shouting, raise your hand and wait for your chance to come. Before you go for the interview, check the website of the company to get a fair idea about the job pro‑le. Contact your seniors in different companies to know how they prepared and what kind of questions were asked in the interviews. You can make two CVs — one for core companies — explaining your projects, another for non-core companies -highlighting your extracurricular activities.
Interview tips
Churn your CV! You should know each and every point you’ve mentioned in the CV. (For example, I had added Ubuntu and Fedora in the ‘operating systems’; they asked me when and how I worked on them and what’s the difference between the two). Prepare an explanation for everything. Remember the entire interview can drift in the direction you take it. Practice solving puzzles as you may sometimes encounter standard puzzles directly in an interview. Search on Google — ‘Coin puzzles’, ‘Prisoner puzzles’, ‘Hat puzzles’ and solve all the puzzles belonging to each category. This will cover most of the standard puzzles those help you shape your logical thinking which help in order to crack the puzzles directly in an interview. Remember, DO NOT directly tell the final answer if you are not sure. Your approach matters more than the answer. Explain the approach first. Most people don’t use pen and paper while explaining their projects to the interviewer. How can you expect the interviewer to understand the work which took you an entire semester?
Everything depends upon how you explain. Focus more upon what you’ve learnt and their applications in real life in an interesting way. Be alert. The interviewer may fire a random or an unexpected question at you. For example, in Oracle interview, just after I answered two back to back puzzles, the interviewer suddenly asked me ‘How will you convince your grandmother to use internet?’ I had no clue whatsoever!
All the best!
