My Placement @ Infosys

In IIT Kgp placement season starts from December 1st  and continues till the companies are interested in what they call us “Cream of India”. For us (M.Tech ECE) it started a bit early ie. 30th November evening i was giving the written exam for Texas Instruments(TI). For us our 3rd sem final exams were delayed till 28th NOV enough to make a permanent unrepairable dent on our Placement dreams . Not having a clear idea of how exactly should i prepare myself, days and companies came and went.

But i had an interesting start to my placement season. DEC 2nd was the day when company named Brocade Comm.  called us for written test,  a good networking company was a dream but without preparation it was close to nightmares.

5.35am : I was awake..
5.45am: I kicked Abhishek to wake him up and reminded him about our first dream company written test starting at 6am.
6.05am: Impeccably dressed up in White shirt & Black pant, we reach V1(where test was held)… (without toothbrush or other chores.)
6.06am: All rest 500-600 students looking at us… we were the only ones ‘impeccably’ dressed! Others were in casuals/ sweaters. Felt embarassing!
6.30am-7.30am: The test. 3 sections- Apti, OS concept & C-prog. Little difficult. Attempted 35/50 questions. And then came back to room.
12 noon: waiting for result was too painful so i thought it would be better to have my own sweet little nap.
12.10pm: This time it was Abhishek’s turn to kick my ass. Results out! Abhishek, myself, Jacob & Prince selected for Tech interviews starting 12.15pm. Adding to the anxiety i got a call from Placement office that i was the first one to be interviewed. <HELL>
12.20pm: Wiping all the sleep from eyes, went inside the interview room.
1.05 pm: unlike others i had 2 different interviews.  Interview over.
8.00 pm: Interview results out. Only Prince selected.

Total 30 students were shortlisted for interview and finally 7 got selected.  In the first week when with good jobs and not forgetting to mention high packages came to our campus. Some of them were..

Brocade Comm, Intel, Alcatel Lucent, Goldman Sachs, Analog Devices, Mentor Graphics, Qualcomm,nVidia, Cisc0, Synopsys, Oracle, Ericsson, HP, Tejas Instrument and many more…

From 2nd Dec till 10th Dec i tried and was rejected in all of them.. reason being unable to qualify written tests, heavy competition( comeon  its IIT), big companies with small requirements, disaster interviews ( Oracle lasted for 10 mins   ).

But with time preparation improved and finally came the most hectic day of my placement season ie. 10th Dec. From morning 7 am we had written test for HP which started at 10 and performance was satisfactory. Again not qualified, but still i waited their and helped others as a moral booster for those who got through. afternoon i came back to  my room and the news was out that Infosys is coming for the placements same evening.

Preparation was ok but still did’nt wanted to loose again so went thru everything as fast as i could. we were called at 8pm. Reached Vikramshila and it was a mela kind of a scenario, It seemed that everyone was eligible for appearing. it was kind of a superslow process where we took our seats at 10pm and Infy guys finally came at 11:30pm, the wait was again painful. after that again they started a long process of filling up the form. its was around 00:15 morning when we had question papers in our hand and we started with the test. it went well and i submitted paper in a  positive frame of mind by 2 am morning.  but again adding to the overloaded tiredness came a colossal news from hell. Tejas Network guys were there wanting to take their written test from 2:30 in the morning ( r u serious ) . But still i went for it, i could’nt afford to loose a company just because of a silly reason of me dying due to tiredness.

Then i gave a tough really tough written exam that sucked everything out me, it ended about 4:30 in the morning. i reached my room by 5 and did’nt slept untill 6 checking all the notices and mails. then i don’t know when & what happened i got a knock at my door at  8am “abe saale jab tera written nikal hai tu ghoda bech k soya rehta hai” it was abhishek. could’nt abuse him for waking me up because he came with a good news, bas news was that i had to reach Takshashila by 8:30. Abhishek was already placed in Mentor Graphics (YO Abhi..) so this time it was his turn to help me out with my pre interview preparations. i would like to share with u all an incident when abhishek’s second interview call came from Mentor Graphics,  he forgot his updated CV(he has the habbit of getting into trouble when u least expect it) and called me for it. (i was asleeping ). then out of nowhere in just 10 mins i got a print out of his CV,  took someone’s cycle and raced t0 takshashila in my dirty boxer and Tshirt (high priority package was delivered with all the embarrassment in the world ).

So coming back to my placement, i waited for about half hour for my interview turn.. then finally moment of truth came. Question they askedwere technical as well as HR, my Mtech project was the main topic of discussion for my interview and some C question here and their. Some hardware question were also asked which i did’nt answer completely and one or two from social activities . Finally i came out confused and yet trying to figure out how eveything went. Interviewers asked me to wait outside.. so i was doing so, then finally HR(he was also from my hometown jamshedpur, sounds like an advantage ) called me and directly gave me the good news that i was selected. Job profile given to me was of  Technology Analyst and finally i got my most preferred job location Bangalore.