My XL journey to ELITE

I have always dreaded the placement process of B-schools. The stakes are high, the odds are low, and there are so many equally deserving people pitted against each other for the same roles that it feels inhuman on some levels.

I thank the stars which were on my side this time whenever I relive the last few hours that wound me up in one of the most ELITE roles on campus.

After a long day of waltzing around from one room to the other, with a zillion cups of coffees-to-go, writing pages after pages of GD ideas to the point where my favorite notebook was scribbled with half-baked ideas all over, I was called once again for the GD process of Capgemini ELITE.

Before the GD started, they asked us to introduce ourselves. It was a simple task, “Tell us something interesting about you in a line”.

We generally prepare for these questions, “Introduce yourself”, “Please walk us through your CV” and the likes. But this one liner—I hadn’t thought about that.

Most of the people before me shared their unique versions of interesting, and with every person who spoke, I discarded the shoddy answer I had hastily come up with 2 seconds ago. Before I could really put together any impressive descriptions, with the observation that all my colleagues in the panel were engineers, these words spilled out of my head: “I am an arts graduate among a million engineers trying to make sense of management in a Business School". The interviewers laughed, and that obvious truth saved me from embarrassment.

The 4 hour interview process covered all aspects of my personality: from the most recent marketing internship at HUL to my family background. I knew I had fallen in love with this organization when, unlike other organizations which were looking for one reason to reject you, the interviewers not only tried to understand the reasons behind my life’s biggest failure and how I coped with it, but also commended me for honestly sharing the stigmatized story that could have potentially belittled by candidature.

At the end of the process, when I was offered a job as an ELITE GMP trainee, one of the interviewers welcomed a completely surprised me to the ELITE program by saying, “Now you are going to be an arts graduate among engineers from a coveted B-school trying to manage a french multinational corporation.”

 With the prologue so fascinating, I cannot wait to unfold the rest of the pages and see where the journey takes me.

Looking forward to June! :)

#Capgemini_ELITE