I don’t know about other college placements…but the current ongoing IIT placements at the different IITs across India for the Class of 2023 is a true test of physical and mental strength! If you have seen the Netflix series – ‘Alma Matters’ – you might fairly know what I am talking about…here goes my son’s IIT placement journey at IIT-R in greater detail:
If I could describe the entire placement journey in one word – it is “WAITING, WAITING AND MORE WAITING”!! Most of you might be knowing, but in case you didn’t know – my son is a final year student at IIT-R in the Engineering Physics stream. Final year began in July 2022 and we knew what that meant – placements during the end of the seventh semester!
July, August, September went quietly. Many companies started visiting the campus by end of September 2022 and first round of tests were conducted. The dreaded ‘R’ (recession) word raised its head out of the blue and many were wondering about the effects of the recession on the placements.
True to fears, recession hit alright and the Class of 2023 will never need a theoretical explanation of what a recession is(they lived through it)! Here is a timeline of events leading to the interviews:
Before that, a small personality close up of my son – he is a smart and silent boy who mostly keeps to himself. He would rather figure things on his own than knock on his neighbor’s door and ask for information! 🙂 He had never sat up beyond 11:30 at night and never knew how to keep awake the entire night and manage life the following day!(the relevance of this information will be revealed shortly!)
Late September 2022: Companies start arriving at the campus and written tests are conducted
October 2022: More companies come but bigger giants like Amazon, Adobe, Cohesity, DE Shaw are distinctly invisible. Amazon had initially stated that they would be coming to campus – but announced that they were going back on their plans and would not be recruiting after all. All the major tech giants had given handsome PPOs(Pre placement offers) the previous year and they were not actively recruiting now.
The results of the tests were not available for almost a month and you have no clue whether you have done well in a test or not. The waiting game has already begun. What do you do in such a situation? We just continue to write more and more tests in the hope that we are shortlisted for interviews for at least some of them.
It is to be noted that 95% of companies come only for coding interviews. And some of them open only for circuit branches(EEE, ECE and CSE)
The helicopter mom, I am – I was also keenly looking at the companies that were coming for recruitment. No surprises there, software and coding rock the field even today!
So, what do students who are in non-circuit branches like Mechanical, Civil, Chemical do? Just learn coding along the way in your 4 year degree program and sit for placements! (unfortunate, isn’t it?)
November 2022: After having written multitude of test, the results of the tests finally start getting declared.
It was with sheer happiness that we saw my son had been shortlisted for not one or two but for 7 companies !! 🙂 There were companies like SquarePoint, Oracle, Sprinklr, MathWorks to name a few. SquarePoint was a day zero company which means they were offering the highest salary of almost a crore! (yes!:))
So, what happened in the interview and where did my son get placed? Stay tuned for the next post.…
DO READ MY E-BOOK ‘MISSION – IIT – R’ ABOUT MY SON’S ENTIRE IIT-R JOURNEY FROM THIS LINK!!
Sanjeevani!! 