Getting started with placements: How you can do better?

In continuation with the article written before, Getting started with placements: What will you do?, I have come up with it's second part. This article basically focuses on the mistakes made by students in the placement scenario and how those can be improved.

Now let us look at this entire process in retrospect. Why did it happen that you were not able to get a good placement whereas the other guy (whom you consider far less intelligent than you) got placement in the beginning itself? There can be many different reasons which resulted in you getting such placement and see where you could have improved.

1.      Most important thing which lacked was a goal. You never cared to decide the type of company you wish to join. You just wanted to go into a company which offers maximum amount of money. For this reason, you sat in companies and for profiles which were alien to you.

2.      You compared yourself with your friends and other students. Never ever compare yourself with anyone. It does not matter that the other person is more or less intelligent than you. Once you are out of college you will be least bothered about his company or package.

3.      You considered your success as being directly proportional to the package you get. If you feel that you have the caliber, knowledge, intelligence and smartness then why you are worried?  You will get promotions at lightning speed and within no time you will be more successful than your other friends (I am using your analogy here which states that success is directly proportional to package). Don’t worry about these small things. Most importantly, you have to set your goals and work on achieving those goals. Don’t run after these petite goals which will be futile in the long run.

4.      You did not care about the profile offered by the company. If I ask you to a test in Latin language, will you be able to give? On the contrary, you would call me a fool. Similarly, in this context I will call you a fool. When you don’t have any idea about coding and programming, why did you sit for such profiles in the first place?

5.      After a certain amount of time, all the rejections made your life miserable and you made the lives of your dear ones miserable. Each and everything started making you irritable and you reached a situation where you would resort to any method to get placed. There were few friends of mine who went to some BABA because they were not getting placed. And BABA said very obvious thing, “Beta. Padhai kro aur naukri lag jygi!!!” (son, just study and you will get good placement). Isn’t it obvious that to get good placement, we need to study and work hard?

6.      If you would have set your goal and sat in few companies which offer profile as per your interests, then I am pretty sure you have secured much better placement. The reason being, in such situation you would have directed all your energy into one direction and focused on that and in such situation, fruits are very sweet. But what actually happened was very different. You focused your energy in all the direction which created energy sinks for you and this delayed you from achieving your so called success. If I talk in terms of Physics, you have to act like a red light which is highly directional instead of acting like a yellow light which scatters in all directions.

So, these are few examples experienced by me during my placement season. There were so many mistakes made by me, so many mistakes made by my friends, but at the end what matters is the learning process. I learned so many things during that time and therefore, I am sharing my experience with you so that you don’t commit the same mistakes.