Career 101 : Your first real world problem

Extending it from the buddy talk last week delivered at IIT Bombay LH 101. It was an awesome experience, to see myself among a good number of students, to be back to the same lecture hall. If you are looking for only resources for preparation, skip to placement material section.

Check if you are an audience: Anyone who will be a part of placements (Students, Startups and companies) at all IITs, NITs and other engineering colleges.

The Sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves.

About me and what this article covers: I am a civil engineer, but my business is to design architecture for startups, not in civil engineering but software engineering. I have always had an urge to teach, to share with others what I’ve figured out for myself. It is that same urge that makes me want to share the lessons I’ve learned. I graduated from IITB in 2014, worked with Quikr for 6 months and then moved to set up my own startup, but I am not in a mood of publicity. This is really the crispest and concise article written, after a good number of pings from some of you guys, to help you make a decision during this high time.

All you need to know about placements: Placement is highly unfair, not only for those who don't land up with a job on day {1, n} rather also for those who wrap up on day-one-slot-one. Who gets most hit? Company,recruiter or you? Sooner or later you will figure out in which set you are. Get used to this unfair concept. This will solve at least (50+x)% of your problems during placements, where x is proportional to number of days delayed in getting job.

Why it's unfair? A majority of you will be late to figure out what you want to do in life. Some of you will be confused in consulting, analyst, risk management (? ) till you hit the deadline of preparations. Some of you will be late to practice basics of c++. Some of you will have high cpi. Some of you will have low cpi. Your high cpi will push you somewhere you don't want to go. Your low cpi will drag you out from the league you are made for. You will feel freefall under gravity and will like to land as early as possible. Your career will be broke or accelerated. Yes broken can be fixed down the line, but it's a hard job. Sometimes you may not be able to recover. Work hard for these 2 months to avoid any setback.

But you learn. Placement is one of the most important phase of life. First time you will learn to manage failure. You will compete with your best friends. You will burst into tears, sometimes because you will fail and sometimes because your best friend will fail against you. This will be most emotional period of entire IITB lifetime valfis included. You will feel you don’t have control on your life. But yes, you will learn to handle your failure. You will learn to support your friend like you never did. At the end, you will remember everybody who helped you to sail through the sea. You will thank them for their support in reaching the shore.

Why mentioning all these is necessary? Because once you hit the date, you should not be messed up in managing these emotions. You should be crystal clear where you have to focus. You will end up blaming the system sooner or later. Because nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves.

Preparation Business (In Order):

1. Decide your career path (toughest job on earth): Google won’t help much. Better ask your seniors. They know what will you end-up doing. If you are inclined to core, first ask seniors who are at least 6-10 years experienced, include professors, seniors working with core companies, seniors pursuing MS and PhD. Then take a second opinion from anybody else.
2. Own skills: Make a checklist of skills you have put on your resume. Understand why it exists, what are the uses and what are the frequent questions. Figure out necessary skills needed for some profiles which you didn’t put in resume. Work on it.
3. Be a cook: Make a list of ingredients you have in your resume. Cook stories according to your company. Do not put everything for every company. Be selective about what serves the purpose.
4. Practice GD: Make group for GD. Include some unknown people in the group. Google the important points to take care in GD.
5. Practice Speaking: Filter out unnecessary lingo. It takes a while. If you are not a regular english speaker, accept that you need to practice.
6. Mock Interviews: Learn to bring all the cooked recipes on table. Meet some seniors for mock interviews. Do it in your group.
7. Take tests: Time material one stop, easily and freely accessible :)
8. Master puzzles: Puzzles can be asked anywhere in any interview. I don’t have the book. Will look for it.
9. Manage Stress: Stress is one thing which kills all your creativity and intelligence. If you can manage your stress, you will mange your talent well. Stress problem can be solved. Practice hard and drop all fear. You will be confident to take care of it. Stress management is the 60-70% work in interview.

Minimal resources to refer (for lazy students :P ):

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBs... (Watch it and document it as per your need)
2. 64 HR: https://soulsearch.files.wordpress.com/... (Take a printout)
3. Supermath app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/...
4. Your resume

Suggestions and write-ups are invited from all who can contribute. Will write more about specific profiles very soon.

          Coming Soon: Tech vs Non-tech          Consulting, Business Analyst, Banking, Trading, Technology, Data Science, Research