"Summers Fever"
- by Anuj Arora *
"Life is a roller coaster you just have to ride in�"
with these lyrics from Ronan Keating's song, I continue. Two terms are over,
I've been placed for summers with a decent company (can't tell the name, have to
save my internship) in Banglore, and I'm almost used to the grilling life over
here but don't want to push the limits. This time while thinking about writing
another article, I was a bit apprehensive. The website guys would be tired of
reading my articles & they may say, "NOT HIM AGAIN". But due to innumerous
replies, I've got from the readers and their request to write more about life in
here, I said ok, I anyway feel like writing a diary of some sorts when I write
these articles, so here I'm.
This time I would give you a snap shot of Summers placement
procedure over here and some other interesting incidents. To start with more
than 45 people have been placed abroad including 36 for I-Banking aka Investment
Banking. To give more descriptive idea, we've four sections in our batch. In one
of the section (A) itself, there are 11 I-Bank foreign placements. I think that
tells it all. Now about the procedure, first the CVs of the whole batch are sent
to the companies based on which a short-list is made, and then there are rounds
of GDs & Interviews for almost all companies. After that, there are lists of
people getting offers from different companies, and the student decides which
company he would choose. There is one important thing, for all those working
right now and planning to do MBA someday, I would advise that you try to get in
with around less than 2 years of work experience, because with more than that
amount of work experience, sometimes it can go against you in summers. That is
my perception and a sincere request to the GIRLS - please study hard and get in.
Your life would be heaven once you get in (but remember the concept of
relativity). Companies, especially banks, have preference for girls for both
summers and final placements. The reason being that boy to girl ratio is around
1:7, so you can guess the situation - at least the poor engineers can.
Some companies have a PPO policy (Pre-Placement Offer), which
means that the company where you did your summers offers you a job based upon
your work in summers itself, so you can just chill and enjoy life to the
maximum.
There are some other sideline benefits as well of being here.
To give an example: A fresher and 21 year old guy like me (didn't I tell you
that??), gets to be on three National Channels (Aaj Tak, CNBC and NDTV to be
aired soon). Never in my wildest dreams I would have thought that to happen. All
that was in response to the recent CAT scandal. This has been made possible
because of IIM-A being the Mecca of management education in India and I happened
to be there to air my views. In addition to that, in the recently held
CONFLUENCE (India's biggest International B-School event), I got an excellent
opportunity to talk to the students from world's best business school, like,
Wharton, London Business School, MIT Sloan & a lot more, and now am in contact
with them.
But life over here is not totally virtual. For example,
during the recent match of India vs. Australia, that India won, our professor
allowed us to come to the class 15 minutes late, which otherwise is totally
impossible.
There are so many learnings that you get here, for example,
for the first time, I realized the advantages of wearing specs, you can sleep
right under the prof.'s nose, and that even if you have a presentation at 9:00
in the morning, you can work whole night till 7:00 (another unwanted night-out)
and stay in your senses, etc.
On this note, I would end this post and wish you all a very
Happy New Year and Best of luck!!!
P.S. The writer represents a
school of thought prevalent in IIM-A and the institute is in no way responsible
for his ideas and weird comments or observations.
