Placements Day 1

This is a post about my story and experience with the placements conducted in IIT-Delhi during my undergraduate studies. Though it has been around 3 years since I sat for placements, I hope this post will still prove useful for some future generations of students, to give them a glimpse of the chaos on the interview day. But more importantly, having gone through the process and having seen how the results of that day affected the last 3 years of me and some of my batchmates, I wish to throw light on how insignificant the day is in the grand scheme of things.

A disclaimer though before we start - this is my personal experience of the process. This doesn’t imply this kind of experience is common. It might as well be the case that my experience is one in a hundred or so. And I sincerely hope the process has improved over the last couple of years. I want to highlight that my intention in writing this post is only to help future generations of students get an idea of how the interview day can pan out and how to better prepare themselves. I hope if nothing else, this story gives you a good laugh at how things turned out for me. A final note on why I am writing this so late - I had been trying to find the motivation to write this for a very long time, but somehow only managed to put this down very recently.

Let me first start by giving some background about the placement process in general. The way placements happen in IITs (and IIT-Delhi in particular) is that companies can come and conduct written tests to shortlist students throughout the semester (September/October - November season). Since this test is somewhat disruptive to the general semester workload of a student, the administration tries to club these tests together on say a few days or weekends. At the time of writing this post, I am somewhat aware that IIT-Bombay has taken some steps to reduce such disruption caused by the placement process. These steps were in the making in my time in IITD, with a lot of high-level discussion going on. I am not aware of how things have changed in IITD now. But anyway, the point is that the interview shortlisting keeps happening throughout the semester with the final interviews scheduled to be held on the 1st of December onwards.

In my case, I had a Pre-Placement Offer from a company - let’s call it W - but nevertheless decided to sit through the rest of the placement process. If I remember correctly, the usual rules of the process during my time allowed the student to either accept or reject the offer until a deadline set by the company (which in case of Goldman and some other firms was 2-3 days from when the offer was given). If a student accepts the offer, he/she is out of the normal placement process and is considered placed by the institute - but if he/she rejects the offer, they can still sit for the rest of the placement process. I and a couple of my friends who had received this offer from company W, were extremely fortunate as the company allowed us to decide on whether to accept or reject the offer by 1st of December, which meant that we could sit through the placements normally on day 1 and if things didn’t work out by end of that day, could go back to accepting the offer from company W. In hindsight, I should have just accepted the offer from company W and focused on my semester, but instead, I ended up trying multiple different things, which screwed up some things for me, as I explain later.

I sat for the written tests of a lot of tech companies and cleared many of them. The result being that in the end, I had somewhere around 12-13 interviews on the first day (1st Dec) itself. In my defense, at the time of the written tests (which usually happens between October to November), no-one knows if that company will end up coming on day 1 or not. So, since I knew I could only appear for companies coming on day 1, if a company looked somewhat desirable, I ended up sitting in their tests. If nothing, I thought, I would at least get some problem-solving practice. In retrospect, a word of advice for future aspirants is not to follow this poorly made strategy. TL;DR, I ended up having way too many interviews to handle on the first day, which led to poor scheduling and lots of chaos.

Fast forward to 30th November, and I was talking to an excellent friend, mentor and senior of mine, who had aced the process a few years earlier. He gave me a sense that he had seen things turn extremely chaotic on the first day due to poor scheduling. Up until this time, in my mind, the scheduling committee (or whoever was responsible for the scheduling of interviews) was an ideal entity who did an amazing job at proper scheduling of interviews, so that all students had a fair chance of sitting for whichever companies had shortlisted them. Or rather I should say the point that things can go bad due to poor organization, wasn’t even up there in my mind. I remember mostly shrugging off this thought, thinking how bad things could be.

I was kind of bit tensed in the days leading up to the D-day. For one, I had heard that in the previous years, the process for some companies used to start as early as 5 AM or so. And me, being a late riser as I am, was worried that I might end up screwing up interviews by sleeping late on the last day. To accommodate this, over the last week of November, I made conscious efforts to reverse my routine and get up as early as 6 AM. Fortunately, on the eve of the D-day, we received a notification on the TnP (Training and Placement cell) website, which informed that the slotting and other details would be made available in the morning of 1st Dec and the earliest interviews would start only at 8 AM. Wooh .. what a relief it was for me! No more tension of getting up at 5 AM 😊.

Finally, the morning of 1st Dec was there, and I ended up getting a good sleep the night before. For context, I had some problems of insomnia in my past, with examples being when I attempted my 10th board Social Science exams with 3-4 hours of sleep, my 12th board Chemistry exams again with 2-3 hours of sleep and finally the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) with a similar number of hours of sleep. In each case though, I beat the expectations of my parents, who thought I would doze off during the exam and instead ended up getting pretty good scores.

I remember feeling anxious as I logged onto the TnP portal that morning to check my interview schedule. And there it was. First interview at 9 AM. Second an hour later at 10, third another hour later at 11 and so on. Finally, there were multiple during the afternoon, with each one being half an hour and all ending up neatly by 9 PM in the night. Thank goodness I thought, I would be able to appear for all interviews and choose the best fit by the end of the day. Little did I know about what was to follow.

I distinctly remember in this schedule there was the interview of company Y (an extremely sought after high-frequency trading firm) at 8 PM in the night. I was looking forward to this company and had specific preparation done for this one. It was about 8:20 AM that I decided to head to the common student mess of my hostel to have some breakfast before heading for my first interview at 9 AM. As I made my way through the now lonely corridors, my phone rang. It was an unknown number and without thinking too much I picked up the phone. A student volunteer on the other end then tried explaining to me that my interview for company Y, which was being shown on the portal at 8 PM in the night, was actually scheduled to be at 8 AM and that I was already late to the interview by about 20 minutes! I tried reasoning with him thinking if this was some kind of mistake - but he insisted that the scheduling on the website was a mistake and that I should immediately make a run for the building where the placements were being conducted. I panicked, and in the chaos that ensued, I picked whatever I could from my room, locked it and made a dash for the placement building on my bicycle. Btw, the last evening, I had neatly packed everything that I would be needing on the day, with CVs and things arranged by what companies I was to appear for. But it so happened that in the chaos, I only managed to get 2-3 hard copies of my CV (I had ~13 slightly different copies edited according to the company I would be sitting for), forgot my wallet (which contained my student ID-card) and also everything else I had packed up for the day. I never made it to the cafeteria/mess and never had any breakfast. Right then, all I cared about was to reach the designated venue as soon as possible.

Finally, after a lot of anxious running, I did reach the venue. But it was already around 8:45 or so. Since I didn’t have any id card on me now, I had to explain everything to the volunteer sitting outside, who was kind enough to let me in (for context, all the interviews were being conducted in this one large building and only shortlisted candidates who had interviews in the next few hours were being allowed to enter the building). When I reached the interview room, I was told to wait to see if there was a slot, since I had already missed mine. After some waiting, another volunteer suggested me to go and appear for the interview of company Z, for which I had interviews scheduled at 9 AM. I did follow through on this, thinking I might miss even this one otherwise.

So, I reached the venue for company Z (a not-so-desirable company for me, for which I initially didn’t plan to appear, but since I had cleared their written tests, I was by-rules required to appear for their interviews). I thought to myself that though I had missed my interview at 8, I might just be able to control the situation and appear for the rest of the process as initially planned, with the next one at 10. First stage interviews - all good, but this itself ended up taking around 45 minutes. By this time, I thought if I stayed for more rounds with this company, there was no chance I could make it in time for the interview at 10. But the recruiters at Z were quite clever - they didn’t allow me to leave the venue and instead made me pass through rounds after rounds (if I remember correctly, there were at least 4 rounds) - as I exited one room, they put in another saying it wouldn’t take more than 10 minutes and which finally ended up taking 30 minutes. By the end of it, I had already missed my interview slot at 10. But by now, it had dawned on me, that it was a stupid idea to try and attempt to sit for all interviews. Rather, if possible, I should only have attempted those which I truly wanted.

As I exited the venue at close to 11 and headed for my interview with a top tech company (let us call this X), I saw the chaos outside. People flocking and waiting in line for their slot. Some sweating, some chilling - but almost everyone anxious. X’s interview venue was a mess - the sight of it was reminiscent of a government building with people waiting in queue to get in. I had 2 rounds of back-to-back interviews here. They went decently well, but each ended up being an hour long. So, by the end, it was close to 1 PM.

As I came out, I headed straight for Y’s venue (the one whose interview at 8 AM I had missed). But the scene at Y was not so great. They were packing up since it was around lunchtime and they looked like they had completed almost all their interviews. The student volunteer present there double checked my name and couldn’t quite believe that I hadn’t taken the interview yet - finally after some urging they agreed to interview me. I was made to wait for another 10-15 minutes, in between which I could overhear people discussing whom to choose - coincidently my dear friends P or Q - debating what skills P had shown over Q and vice versa. It did cross my mind that it might be a waste of my time to attempt this interview since it seemed they had already chosen their candidates. But amidst all this thought, someone came and started my interview. There were 2 technical questions and I guess I ended up doing one of them well, but not the other one. Finally, I thanked them and made my way outside the building - it was now around 2 PM and my next interview didn’t start before 3:30. I could perhaps grab some lunch.

As I made my way outside, I could see a whole spectrum of reactions among students - some had just cracked their dream company, some had failed and looked dejected, some others who were waiting for results and still a few others who didn’t have any interviews on that day and were only there to support their friends. Once outside, I remembered that I didn’t have any money with me since I had left my wallet back in the room at my hostel. I ended up looking for someone familiar and borrowed some money for lunch. By this time, I was completely exhausted - hadn’t had anything to eat since morning, had gone through some stressful interviews and had run quite a bit to make it to the place in the morning. As I relaxed and geared up for the next round of interviews, I thought of everything that had just happened. It was turning out not quite the day I had imagined.

Finally, after a quick lunch, I made my way back. There was now a long queue to enter the building. This was in turn due to the security checks going on - the security staff was frisking people to double-check that they were not carrying phones on them. I ended up giving my phone to my friend and stood there waiting in the long queue. After a moment of wait, my friend ran to me, telling me that I had a call from X (the company for which I had given interviews from 11 AM - 1 PM). X’s recruiter told me that they were interested in hiring me, but would need another round of interviews to finalize. They made it clear that they were packing up and I needed to be with them in another 5 minutes, or else they couldn’t help it. I dashed, skipping the queue and explaining to the student volunteer why I was in a hurry.

To explain what happened next, I would need to build some more context. If you remember, I was going through all this with an offer from company W. However, W had also given us the option to upgrade to an “elite” profile, by only interviewing for a final round with a senior member of the management. This was great - everyone else would have to first pass through a normal round for the normal profile and then if they cleared all these, would they be allowed to appear for this “elite” profile interview. Some of us, like me, on the other hand, already had an offer for the normal profile and could directly end up appearing for the “elite” profile. It was important for me then that I didn’t miss this interview, which was scheduled to be at 3:30 PM. But there I was - already caught up in this X mess at around 3 PM, waiting for their out-of-order interview. In hindsight, I think since X is a big company, they exercised a lot of unwarranted power, which otherwise any startup wouldn’t be allowed to have.

Back at the venue for company X, I was waiting for their interviewers to finish lunch and start my interview. As I waited, I saw a few other friends of mine being interviewed. After a long wait and my consistent pestering, they managed to get someone to interview me. This interview went somewhat decently well. But then they asked me to wait for another round. This completely broke me. It was now around 4 PM and I was already late for the interview I valued more - that of the “elite” profile of company W. But there was still a small chance I could pass X’s interview, which I also valued. But I had to make a call - which way to go - either X or W. If I went for W, X who were maintaining that they were about to leave, would be gone by the time I would return. And if I went for another round at X, my chance at W might slip away. I didn’t know what to do. Finally, I chose to talk openly to X’s recruiter, making them clear of my expectations and asking them if I had a chance. X’s recruiter was kind of taken back but said they would need time to confer and come to a decision. I ended up making a run to W’s interview place, explaining it to them that I might be late and would be back in another 10-15 minutes (side note: I told them I would be back after grabbing a small snack). In the midst of all this, I came back to X, only to find X’s recruiter telling me that I could leave - they couldn’t take me any longer. At least now I could appear for W’s interview finally, I thought as I made my way back to W’s interviewing place.

Back there, it seemed like I was late, and all my friends had already taken the interview. After waiting for some more time, I got a slot but ended up screwing this interview completely. In my defense, by this time, I was exhausted and was making lots of silly mistakes.

Coming out of the interview room, I realized that out of the 12-13 interviews on the day, I had only appeared for 4 till now. I rushed to other company venues, in the decreasing order of my preference for them. I was shocked to see that almost all of them had already chosen their candidates - in some cases had even packed up and gone (for context, my interview scheduling which I had seen on the institute portal in the morning showed most of my interviews after 4 PM). I interviewed for one more company - but this too didn’t go well. In simple terms, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I gave up after this. I realized I was too tired to appear for more interviews and could now only wait for the results to come out.

As I made my way around the building, I saw some students celebrating their offers from dream companies, some more depressed at having been rejected and even more still sitting through rounds after rounds of interviews. I sat down in a corner of the building with some of my friends, reflecting on whatever I had experienced. By this time, I already come to know from friends and seniors as to who was selected in the 3 out of the 4 companies I gave serious interviews for - and it was not me. I was only waiting for the results for “elite” profile of W. If I got that, I would take it, otherwise it was the “normal” profile of W. Anyway, it was clear to me by this time, that W was in high likelihood the company I would be getting an offer from.

At around 8 PM or so, we were told that results for the same would be out on the institute’s portal by midnight. I headed back to hostel now, still amazed at how surreal a day it had been. My feet were sore, my head hurt badly, my stomach churned, but all in all, there was a feeling of relief of having been done with the process. I knew I would be done tonight - one way or the other.

As the clock struck midnight, I opened up the institute portal and realized results were still not out. But then one of my friends called me up and informed me that he had been waiting at the venue till now and he was selected - not me. I felt miserable, but at the same time relieved. Opposite to my room, one of my friends had finally made it back to his room, after interviewing in an even more hectic schedule than me - from 8 in the morning straight till 11 in the night. He seemed more depressed than me, at having no offer in hand, even after a day so chaotic. But as midnight struck, he checked his portal and was relieved to see that one of the last companies he had interviewed for had selected him. Until this point, he was getting ready for another round of battle the next day - but now he too was extremely relieved.

Hold on, the story still has a twist left. I ended up spending the night surfing around, finally feeling relieved after months of tension, preparation, planning, and self-doubt. I had emailed W’s recruiter that I would be taking up W’s original offer.

9 AM the next day, as I relax sitting in my room - my phone again rang from an unknown number. It was a student volunteer - this time he was congratulating me that I had been selected for the international profile of company Z whose interviews I had given the previous day (the first company I had interviewed the previous day). I was confident by now that I didn’t want the offer - so I ended up telling him I had already taken W’s offer. He seemed confused and handed the phone to a senior member of the administration - who after listening to my statement, was infuriated. I was threatened that I had broken some rule and that all my offers might be withdrawn. I tried explaining, but it didn’t help. The person cut the phone mid-way through the argument. As I put down the phone, I realized what had just happened. My only offer was also now in danger of being revoked. I felt a chill down my spine - I didn’t know what to do, whom to contact - nothing. I ran to one of my friends - but as ironic as it could be - he listened to me half-asleep and tossed from one side to another as I finished. What a friend, I thought.

A few more minutes passed, and I was called up again by the same student volunteer, who said my request had been accepted and I could retain my offer from company W. Now, I felt truly relieved.

This marked the end of a rather crazy 24 hours for me. In the last few months, I had appeared for around 30-35 companies written tests, had been shortlisted for 12-13 interviews on day 1, could only manage to appear for 5 and only get selected in one – and which I finally refused to choose the original one, the offer which I already had with me the whole while. Ironically, a friend of mine, who also had the offer from W originally, had accepted it and only appeared for the “elite” interview of W - chilling the rest of the time, enjoying his semester.

I want to convey a few points from this story. Firstly, following the herd without knowing why might not be a good idea. In my case, I didn’t even know why I wanted to crack a particular company - for the most part, I think the reason was only that everyone wanted it and so I was also trying frantically for it. I have learned my lesson and mended my ways. Secondly, my efforts were not directed - I ended up being lousy in my initial selection and which resulted in way too many interviews than I could handle on the first day. Thirdly, don’t always blindly trust the system - I started the day without knowing the extent of the chaos that could happen. It resulted in poor choices, bad scheduling and n number of different problems. It might be a good idea to get in touch with some seniors to get an idea as to how the day might pan out. I think being mentally prepared beforehand definitely helps.

A final note before I depart - this day is as insignificant and overhyped as it could be. It has been around 3 years since that day and I can tell you with good confidence that most of my friends are not where they were initially placed. Most of them moved within 1-2 years. Some even found better choices in the ensuing semester from Jan-April of that year. Others found their calling after a year, few others after 2 years and still a few others who are looking to switch jobs as I write this. The point being that placements day is not the end of the world – it is the beginning - there isn’t a good reason to rejoice or feel dejected. This is your first company and many others will follow - just try finding what and why before you settle down on a career or a company. As for me, I decently managed my semester workload somehow - in between studying for placements, managing courses, getting an extension on my B.Tech project, and skipping all my mid-exams due to a 15 day out-of-action bout of dengue fever (4 out of which I spent immobilized and hospitalized - but that is a story for another day). I feel if only I knew what career path I wanted to take with more certainty, I would only have focused on that. I hope some of you will read this and apply my learnings to avoid committing the same mistake again. Placements Day 1 didn’t bring me anything new effectively, but it is a day I find worth remembering for the rest of my life (and which is why I wrote this post 😊).