April 29th - Read on..

Placements have always drawn interest from all Quarters. Be it The parents of Prospective students at the Different Engineering Colleges, The students themselves asking the seniors in the college “Chetta ivide ethokke company aa varaaru??” The truth is that in the present scenario, The Engineering Colleges coming up like new flats and other residential complexes, Parents and students alike don’t have any other criteria to judge an institution other than the Campus Placements that the college boasts of! I have been Lucky enough to study in a College that was just 4 years into its operation when I landed in it and the college has shown an exponential rate in the number of Campus placements!! Hats off to Ramesh Sir, Our Placement Coordinator without whose untiring efforts nothing would have been possible. He has transformed this college to a college that boasts of more than 75% placements which is something Stupendous for a College that is just into its eighth year. The placements for our college started on April 29 2006, when we were going through our sixth semester studies. The Company that was at college was HCL Technologies And the mechanical branch were not allowed to take the tests. The company was for the Circuit Branches as the Company puts it!
Cutting out all the crap! Coming to the turn of events that happened just before the placements, A few students who feel that they have studied enough for the day plan to get out classes in the name of Campus placements and start the work. The work is pretty easy. Involves Collecting the marks of all students who meet the required Cut-Off and enter that into an Excel Sheet and if necessary to verify whether they meet the required Cut-Offs!(Now you know how easy an work that will be!! )
It was the first company that was coming to our college and every student worked their asses off to get placed! Was I one in that group? Yaa . Not exactly. I didn’t work that difficult! What sort of crap did I cram up into my head?? We had a combined study two days before the day the company was supposed to be in Campus! And sadly the placements were postponed from that day! We named the day C-Day!!


C-Day
I don’t remember the exact date but the only thing that I remember is that we had gala time @ My house. I, Robin, Rahul and Kurien met up to brush up our C and C++ Skills which were a necessity for every company that recruits freshers. The study materials had been taken out and Kurien as usual began his classes on what all topics that he knew! Sadly that is the time when our Eyes fell on the Carroms board in my room. Slowly but steadily our attention began to divert from studies and ten to fifteen minutes later we were @ the board! The teams. Hari and Rahul pitted against Kurien and Robin. The game went on for over an hour and was evenly fought. After the game we decided that a bit of browsing won’t do us any bad. We started to collect some Info on the company that was coming to College! We found about the CEO and the various projects that the company were undertaking at that stage. Robin had pointed out somewhere in his resume that he was a Free Software Freak! We searched up some stuff about the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and something about the various advantages and disadvantages that a Free Software had! We had heard companies grilled us on the topics that we mentioned in our resumes! So these thoughts lead us to do some Ground-work on the topics mentioned in the resume! By the time we finished this the time was past twelve. And Studies had taken place for less than ten minutes. We started with our second game of Carroms! This went on will 3.00 am in the morning and we decided that it was enough and retired to our Sleeping Bags!

C-Day (This one is the original!)

Nothing much to write about this day because this happened two days before the Company was supposed to come. Everyone was studying really hard so that they could make it to the interview stage! Seven guys were there and we literally shared the information that we had. Discussed the various doubts, That’s it! We had learnt the very basics of C/C++ over a period of two hours! And the topics drifted off. We talked on everything under the sun. Chit chatted and finally dozed off.

D-Day

The D-Day arrived. The day was the 29th of April, HCL technologies on Campus, The first company that’s coming for our batch. Dressed up in the best attire, I leave home and reach the college by 9:00. The attire is something which I hated the most. A full sleeved Shirt and black pants. Hoo! How I hate such kinda attire!! Had the Pre placement talk by the company’s Bigwigs. Was fun listening to it. Not listening to a single word in that! The placement procedure was simple. We had a placement test which tested our knowledge on C/C++ and the basic Aptitude and then a Personal interview!
The test was an objective one. It was Blah Blah Blah.(I Forgot! ) The time had come when the HCL guys were going to read out the names of the persons who cleared the test! All of us assembled near the staffroom waiting in bated breaths. Yeay!! Hooray!! I cleared the test!! It was sad to see many of your pals missing out. And the shock in waiting was the class topper missed out!
After this all of the selected guys assembled and were given the basic lessons in Electronics by Sandeep(Buji) and we just had a quick run-through on the basic terms in C++.

Interview Time

Knocks Knocks…
Me : “ Sir ,May I ? “
Panel: Yes you may. Take your seat.”
( I take the seat and in the process handing over the carefully filled up resume to them! )

Panel: Introduce yourself.
Me. My name is so and so.. And the intro went on.. “Sir, My hobbies are reading. I read a Lot. “

Panel: ”Who is u r favorite author ?”
Me: Sidney Sheldon.
Panel: He is not a good writer. I hate his style of writings and what not.
Poor me: (I Become defensive for a second.) and was helped out by another member of the panel asking me to defend my favorite author. I go on saying that I like his style of writings citing some example.

Panel: See the way your results are falling like the BSE Index.
Me: Cooking up some brilliant reason about my grandmother being serious and me having to attend her.(They believed it. Good Gracious, I lie so well.)

Panel: Which job do you prefer? A Hardware one or Software ?
Me: (Basically I have heard that both jobs are interesting.) Taking a Gamble I say that I prefer a Hardware job over a software job.
Panel: (Pointing to another guy in the panel.) Mr. X is offering you a job in his hardware firm for a lesser salary than the software job. Which one will you take?
Me: I will take the hardware job over the software job.
Panel: Don’t you think that you are undervaluing yourself. People come to us daily asking for software jobs and you are one among the very few asking a Hardware job. Don’t you think you can ask for more salary?
Me: Sir , I would like to work in a field that I prefer rather than a field the one I get more pay.(Hoooooo.. don’t know how I made this up!)

Then Some Hardware Questions followed which I answered in a satisfactory manner.

Panel: Thank you Hari!
Me: Thank you Sir!
Time : 10:00 pm
Room no:208 @ GECB!

All the people who took the interview were asked to assemble in the room. And they read out a list and the people whose names were not in the list were asked to move out. ( Sad that those people missed out and they were lucky enough to be placed in some other company that visited the campus! )
Then one of the HCL Guys said..

“ Welcome to HCL.. “

The HCL guy says. “ Your performance in the technical part was very poor and not up to our mark.” And thus he started blaming us on our techie performance . Time was running. It was close to 11:00 in the night and at this time of the night he asked us to take a C/C++ Test which we had to agree. After saying this, He says then “Take the Offer letters” .We were so happy to hear these words. And after that he handed over our offer letters and we had to fill it up in our own handwritings . The posting was at Noida and the pay was 2.2 lacs per annum.