BACKGROUND: Semester based Engineering curriculum is like Shatabdi Express which only stops at few important stations along the route and one can't even read the name of in-between stations because of its high speed. Semester Exams and their Results are the two NIGHT stops of Engineering. Why NIGHT STOPS ??
The Night before the EXAM plays a tremendous role in an Engineer's life >> The night of exploring the syllabus, xeroxing the toppers' notes (always GIRLS' notes), building a roadmap to crack questions based on last 5 year's Qpapers, making numerous phone calls to spread paper leak rumors etc.
In addition to it, the Night before the RESULTS is also very critical >> In my times, folks used to gather outside the regional print media office which published the university results. As soon as they released the print of the results, the whole sight turned into a kind of wild protest which demanded for "Right to Know the Results." Intolerable shouts consisted of two crucial words "All Clear (Pass in all subjects)" and "Back (Fail in one or more subjects)". In general, nights are very essential for an engineering student. They talk (BC), watch all sort of movies, smoke, drink, copy the assignment, in short everything except sleeping.
Anyways, that's how a normal school pass-out becomes an Engineer ("or rather gets the Engineering degree) !! Nevertheless everyone expects a good JOB, which is an obvious expectation.
TRAINING: As we entered the 5th semester (III year), the Head of Training and Placement Cell addressed to us and handed over the Placement Forms. She claimed " Last year we got (> 300) offer letters and this time I expect more." That politician's like speech was full random statistics and expectations which left people wondering. Who crosschecked the statistics and cared about her raised expectations ? But we clapped after her speech.
The team also distributed "Placement Forms". Those were the funniest forms I had ever filled in. It asked questions like >> What is your dream company ? Which sector you want to work in (like IT, Embedded or so on ? It was hard to believe that TPO team created the form like that because they seemed like ones who needed training and placement both. My friend laughed at the form and doubted " Do we have all choice in life ? "
Interestingly a new subject "Soft Skills" was introduced, dedicated completely to train us for the upcoming months of campus placements. On the first day, the teacher jotted down five English words down and asked us to raise hands if anyone knew the meaning of any of the words. I was amazed to see that few of my batch-mates in the class knew the meaning of the words, I was not even sure if they existed in the language. My friend whispered" they all go to CAT coaching classes". (In this semester, the class was broadly classified in two strata >> Going AND Not Going to CAT coaching classes)
"Okay, that's good to know that ~ 10 % of the class is getting job during placement, very impressive" He said with pride. I didn't understand how that correlated with jobs. May be, only CAT aspirants could withdraw that conclusion. For me, it was the class of losing self confidence and self respect. Tough aptitude questions and never heard words of English were the only attributes of the class. That's how Soft skills were taught in a hard way.
GETTING A JOB: In the beginning of 6th semester, several companies (Only IT companies) visited colleges of my city to organize centralized placements for eligible students. Everyone was so desperate to get a job in whichever company one was eligible for, quite contradictory to what one had filled in the so called "Placement Form". I was NO EXCEPTION.
Few smart folks downloaded Model CVs and others including me copied from them. Including a fascinating career objective was quite a challenging task because one could hardly make plenty of changes in Freshers' CV, however majority of folks had more or less the same career objective, some of them had the same even (word to word). Hard to believe but sometimes while making changes from others' CV, few folks even forgot to change Father's Name, DOB, Gender (quite funny but you cant help it if you copy from girl) etc. Some folks thought why to waste energy in changing the hobbies' section ?
After all who actually knows what they love to do in spare time ? They all do BC or sleep in spare time :)
Written exam has to be qualified prior to Interviews. For interviews, either one had to buy "Let Us C" (Beginners guide to learn C language) or borrowed from someone who had not qualified the written. Buying was rather better option. Anyways some programs like "Fibonacci series, Calculate the factorial" were quite famous programs among the interviewers. I mugged up all of them though was not much sure of explaining them to the interviewer. In addition, answers of some FAQs were also mugged.
A group of 10 students were told to wait outside the room of Panel-1 interviewer. On one hand, majority of them explored "Let Us C", I whispered to my friend "Let Us See who all get through". I became very nervous as my name was called. Interviewer was very busy with his seemed like new "Blackberry Phone" (Blackberry was known to be a status symbol those days and reflected your social status. Iphone was not quite popular, so as Samsung).
He asked me to sit without deflecting his eyes from his BB and put 3-4 questions.
1Q Tell me something about yourself ? He stopped me in a "Not Interested tone" when I said " .... my hobbies are ..."
2Q Why do you want to work in IT industry despite you are from EC cadre ? I wanted to answer " Do we have any choices ?" but I answered what I found on Google.
3Q Do you want to work in Development or Testing ? I said " Development" because that seemed more creative than Testing, though I was completely unaware of both the terms. I argued but interviewer explained with sarcastic smile " There is no creativity in Development, we develop what our client says and Testing Team tests what Development Team develops"
4Q Write a C program to traverse the string ? Oh my god, I didn't mug up that program even few strongly recommended me to do so. I confidently picked up his pen and jotted down the basic structure of a C program then he said " You may go now and send the next one". "Okay sir, thanks. Have a nice day" I said with smile.
I wondered what did he see in me and the folks like me. But that's how I got my "First Job".
My photo was printed on next year's college advertisement which claimed " Highest Placements for 2008 batch" OR "100 % Placements" (Some studies claimed that ~47 % of Indian graduates are unemployable for any job) !! OR "Best Placements"
They took all the credit to attract next year's aimless mass. That's how it is :)
The Night before the EXAM plays a tremendous role in an Engineer's life >> The night of exploring the syllabus, xeroxing the toppers' notes (always GIRLS' notes), building a roadmap to crack questions based on last 5 year's Qpapers, making numerous phone calls to spread paper leak rumors etc.
In addition to it, the Night before the RESULTS is also very critical >> In my times, folks used to gather outside the regional print media office which published the university results. As soon as they released the print of the results, the whole sight turned into a kind of wild protest which demanded for "Right to Know the Results." Intolerable shouts consisted of two crucial words "All Clear (Pass in all subjects)" and "Back (Fail in one or more subjects)". In general, nights are very essential for an engineering student. They talk (BC), watch all sort of movies, smoke, drink, copy the assignment, in short everything except sleeping.
Anyways, that's how a normal school pass-out becomes an Engineer ("or rather gets the Engineering degree) !! Nevertheless everyone expects a good JOB, which is an obvious expectation.
TRAINING: As we entered the 5th semester (III year), the Head of Training and Placement Cell addressed to us and handed over the Placement Forms. She claimed " Last year we got (> 300) offer letters and this time I expect more." That politician's like speech was full random statistics and expectations which left people wondering. Who crosschecked the statistics and cared about her raised expectations ? But we clapped after her speech.
The team also distributed "Placement Forms". Those were the funniest forms I had ever filled in. It asked questions like >> What is your dream company ? Which sector you want to work in (like IT, Embedded or so on ? It was hard to believe that TPO team created the form like that because they seemed like ones who needed training and placement both. My friend laughed at the form and doubted " Do we have all choice in life ? "
Interestingly a new subject "Soft Skills" was introduced, dedicated completely to train us for the upcoming months of campus placements. On the first day, the teacher jotted down five English words down and asked us to raise hands if anyone knew the meaning of any of the words. I was amazed to see that few of my batch-mates in the class knew the meaning of the words, I was not even sure if they existed in the language. My friend whispered" they all go to CAT coaching classes". (In this semester, the class was broadly classified in two strata >> Going AND Not Going to CAT coaching classes)
"Okay, that's good to know that ~ 10 % of the class is getting job during placement, very impressive" He said with pride. I didn't understand how that correlated with jobs. May be, only CAT aspirants could withdraw that conclusion. For me, it was the class of losing self confidence and self respect. Tough aptitude questions and never heard words of English were the only attributes of the class. That's how Soft skills were taught in a hard way.
GETTING A JOB: In the beginning of 6th semester, several companies (Only IT companies) visited colleges of my city to organize centralized placements for eligible students. Everyone was so desperate to get a job in whichever company one was eligible for, quite contradictory to what one had filled in the so called "Placement Form". I was NO EXCEPTION.
Few smart folks downloaded Model CVs and others including me copied from them. Including a fascinating career objective was quite a challenging task because one could hardly make plenty of changes in Freshers' CV, however majority of folks had more or less the same career objective, some of them had the same even (word to word). Hard to believe but sometimes while making changes from others' CV, few folks even forgot to change Father's Name, DOB, Gender (quite funny but you cant help it if you copy from girl) etc. Some folks thought why to waste energy in changing the hobbies' section ?
After all who actually knows what they love to do in spare time ? They all do BC or sleep in spare time :)
Written exam has to be qualified prior to Interviews. For interviews, either one had to buy "Let Us C" (Beginners guide to learn C language) or borrowed from someone who had not qualified the written. Buying was rather better option. Anyways some programs like "Fibonacci series, Calculate the factorial" were quite famous programs among the interviewers. I mugged up all of them though was not much sure of explaining them to the interviewer. In addition, answers of some FAQs were also mugged.
A group of 10 students were told to wait outside the room of Panel-1 interviewer. On one hand, majority of them explored "Let Us C", I whispered to my friend "Let Us See who all get through". I became very nervous as my name was called. Interviewer was very busy with his seemed like new "Blackberry Phone" (Blackberry was known to be a status symbol those days and reflected your social status. Iphone was not quite popular, so as Samsung).
He asked me to sit without deflecting his eyes from his BB and put 3-4 questions.
1Q Tell me something about yourself ? He stopped me in a "Not Interested tone" when I said " .... my hobbies are ..."
2Q Why do you want to work in IT industry despite you are from EC cadre ? I wanted to answer " Do we have any choices ?" but I answered what I found on Google.
3Q Do you want to work in Development or Testing ? I said " Development" because that seemed more creative than Testing, though I was completely unaware of both the terms. I argued but interviewer explained with sarcastic smile " There is no creativity in Development, we develop what our client says and Testing Team tests what Development Team develops"
4Q Write a C program to traverse the string ? Oh my god, I didn't mug up that program even few strongly recommended me to do so. I confidently picked up his pen and jotted down the basic structure of a C program then he said " You may go now and send the next one". "Okay sir, thanks. Have a nice day" I said with smile.
I wondered what did he see in me and the folks like me. But that's how I got my "First Job".
My photo was printed on next year's college advertisement which claimed " Highest Placements for 2008 batch" OR "100 % Placements" (Some studies claimed that ~47 % of Indian graduates are unemployable for any job) !! OR "Best Placements"
They took all the credit to attract next year's aimless mass. That's how it is :)
