Placements for our batch kicked off today, when Nagarro Software came to pick up pre-final year people from MCA and BE(CSE).
The CGPA cutoff was 7.77. Mine is a lowly 6.00.
Practically everyone from my batch who was above the cutoff submitted their CVs. About ten people attended the PPT (pre-placement talk, that is), and only four didn’t get frustrated through the process and gave both the logical reasoning and the technical written tests. After this, two were called for interviews- Amandeep Batra and Ravinder Kaur.
After discussing the tests with the people who took them, I once again regretted my low CGPA. These blokes, despite having CGPAs in stratospheric regions, knew practically nothing in the test. I, on the other hand, seemed to know the answers to the questions that particularly frustrated them.
This came out even more after the interviews- Batra forgot all about virtual functions and virtual classes and flubbed a question on semaphores while giving his interview, and Ravinder Kaur couldn’t remember that the 8-Queens problem is solved by backtracking and neither BFS nor DFS; or what friend functions are for.
In the meantime, I was hanging around the interview hall, coaching a bunch of people on interprocess communication and object oriented programming- people whose CGPAs are much superior to mine.
That’s the bad news. I don’t study, so I never make it pass the first hurdle – CGPA- for campus placement. Then I wind up coaching people who know much less than me, but have much higher CGPAs. And the most frustrating thing is that CGPA is the only thing making life difficult for me. I’m pretty sure I can top all the written tests and interviews, and put up a fair bit of fight in group discussions.
And now here’s the good news.
The best companies- Infosys, TCS, Maruti (though of course Maruti only takes Mech Engineers)- that come to TIET for placements don’t care for CGPA. They don’t put a minimum CGPA criterion at all. They take their own qualifying test. So, getting placed even in Infosys shouldn’t be too difficult for me- provided, that is, that Infosys comes to campus next year.
But, of course, there’s a more important issue to be addressed- should I go for placement at all? It’s all very confusing.