T5E’s Placement survey 2021-22 was conducted between 28 December 2021 and 5 January 2022 to study the statistics of the Placement season of 2021-22. The survey witnessed a total of 326 responses across the entire graduating class (UG+PG). We received several generous tips by our anonymous respondents at several points in the survey. For the benefit of the student body, we have compiled them all here. We sincerely thank our respondents for their valuable insights from their placement journey.
Resume/CV:
- Be thorough with whatever is there in your CV.
- Spend at least a couple of months on your resume (word-by-word) and course preparation if you intend to aim for Core Engineering profiles.
- Make a solid resume, spend sufficient time on it, finish it by ~Jun, and be well-versed with its contents, especially interns and projects. Do not bluff, not even SQL and HTML. Make sure that there is/are something in your resume that sets you apart from the rest. Get your resume reviewed by a few trusted seniors and friends.
Coursework
- Doing the course work inside the institute is important. Everyone today has online certificates to show. We learn in the best engineering institute in the country so having done relevant coursework inside the institute will have more weightage than showing some online certification. Projects (completed with universities like IITs or IISC) will give a lot of talking points during interviews.
- Irrespective of CGPA, courses prep should be perfect.
Soft Skills
- Polish your soft skills, as in an interview setting it’s on you to show you stand out, by showing the relevance of PoRs and achievements on the resume and how they have equipped you with the skill set they’re looking for.
Quant/Aptitude
- Prepare well in advance for quant as this section comes in lots of tests and get thorough.
- Prepare aptitude and puzzles well.
- Study Aptitude way before and practice before exams. Don’t apply for every company just for aptitude practice.
CGPA
- Start Early, Maintain good CGPA.
- CGPA matters. Any kind of preparation will be useful. Don’t get too low.
- If CGPA is good(>8 for CS,>8.5 for others) then it would be relatively easy to cut competition for Day 1 companies.
Internships
- Try to explain your projects and internships thoroughly.
- Having experience in using the knowledge that you have acquired in projects and internship matters.
Preparations
- Do not apply for too many companies, have a fixed target profile and prepare well for that.
- Choose one or two profiles and work only on them. Don’t apply to too many companies randomly, once you have about 8-10 SLs focus on interviews.
- Earlier you start the better obviously. Apply to profiles selectively – one primary and one backup. Prepare selectively and religiously towards only these profiles. Check out placement stats and evaluate your strengths and interests before choosing them. Lastly, coding is very very important and since nearly half the profiles are SDE, it can be a great backup.
- Give a proper thought before you choose the profile that you want to apply for. Read JDs, attend PPTs, talk to seniors before making the final call. Don’t take stress and prepare properly.
Core
- For core companies, start your preparation from summer break itself and practice questions on online sites like Indiabix, Examveda, Texalab. And do focus on increasing pace in the Aptitude section.
- As far as Mechanical core is concerned, prepare online material like Vedantu, exam veda and all the questions in the placement exams are from them. Instead of preparing them, I made a mistake in reading the text books, wasting more time on it. It was of no use as the questions from those websites are very new from what we learn in academia. Those who prepared those online materials succeeded well. Start right now from January for placements.
Coding/Algorithm/Data Science
- CS, take any coding platform and code all generic questions early before placement season starts in september.
- Coding profiles: Start 2-3 months before placements at the least. Practice Leetcode and Hackerearth problems. Thoroughly revise Data Structures and Algorithms. Revise OS, DBMS, Networking. Keep track of the placement whatsapp group to not miss any deadlines. Have a good idea of the companies and profiles that are to come.
- Learning and Practicing from Leetcode is SUFFICIENT. I never did CP, just did rigorous practice from leetcode for 7 months and I could crack almost all coding tests (except Google, Razorpay and another 1-2 comps, which were really tough).
- If you are sitting for non-core, applying for IT Roles, it’s very important to not just have very strong basics in DSA but also core CS, networking topics as well.
- Prepare for coding since at least may or april.
- Don’t only solve coding questions ,but you should also be capable enough to explain the entire approach to someone.
- Start preparing for it a year ago if you are not from CS. In CS if you want to Crack a good job, leetcode is your platform. Practice at least 100 questions before appearing.
- Start Competitive Programming preparation early on (around 7-8 months prior to placements would be ideal) if you are targeting Software/Data Science & Analytics/Finance roles since the competition in the tests would be insane.
- If you are applying for IT profiles be it data analytics, data science, web development or software development you must be familiar with data structures and algorithms. I suggest you solve medium to hard level questions. To be eligible for the interviews you must pass the coding test conducted by the companies. I would suggest you to follow a CP sheet covered by STRIVER(Youtuber), solve that sheet , it covers almost all the topics and you will be perfect with almost all the topics needed for tests. Next you can try questions from platforms like Geeks for geeks, leetcode etc, try to solve 2-3 medium to hard level questions daily so that you are perfect till the tests start. Practicing these type of questions is must because there is no way to interview if you don’t solve the questions in test conducted by the company Here is the link for STRIVER CP sheet, you can also do your research and find more about him Striver’s CP List(Solely for preparing for Coding Rounds of Top Prod Based Companies)
Projects
- Focus on projects. Your resumes should have a bunch of attractive projects and make sure you revise them to explain on the day of interview.
- As a Master’s student, I would like to weigh in on the role of master’s project in the placement. – Orient the project in such a way that it covers a wide industrial expertise.
- Start preparing as early as possible, do a lot of personal/projects with profs in the field of your choice if you think you lack professional experience in it.
- spend at least 1 day per project written on a resume to be on good grounds when a question is asked.
- If aiming for a Data Scientist profile, have good previous projects in this domain and have good knowledge about the topics.
General Fundaes
- You can’t do this alone.
- Start preparing early! – Be in contact with your seniors; Keep asking for fundaes. Don’t hesitate to contact unknown seniors. So many people missed out on important fundaes due to this.
- Find someone who is preparing for the same role as you and prepare together. For example, me and a friend sat for LeetCode contests together which was very helpful.
- Also, don’t let inferiority complex get the good of you. There will be god level students sitting alongside you in the tests. Prepare well and be confident in your preparation. I strongly suggest you set reasonable goals.
- Start early, stay focused even if you start late, work on writing tests as they are the first stage and one of the most important one. Play to your strengths, make sure you cover all important points in your resume with in depth knowledge. Also try to be theoretically clear if going for tech roles.
- Find a good peer group to prepare with and harness your learning style because interviewing is a new skill you’re picking up!
- Mothers help is best, even Abhimanyu could break Chakravyuh because of that. Advice don’t sleep before Arjun finishes advice
- Taking off days from preparation helps a big deal. You can do it! All the best.
- Lastly, take care of your mental health.
