Iim Placement Reality Check

1. Work pressure is maddening.Till date I have never felt any job giving me that amount of multitasking and maddening like those 2 years. Weak hearted fellows please stay away.

2. Your graduation degree does matter in the CV. A CA with finance degree would anyways be given preference over an engineer but with following exception in interviews: a girl would be preferred over a guy and a beautiful looking guy over the ugly one in most cases.

3. For most cases, so called big brands come in day 1 of placements, the resumes with IIT tags would be first selected. So if you are from an avg engineering college and think it would be your marks in MBA that it will bring you to even footing then you are wrong. The top salary is a hype. It goes to extraordinary people throughout their lives. A fellow guy had a master CV of 26 pages with last line as 99.99 percentile in CAT. He got 2 crore package. Lowest ones 10 lakh- I am not taking about last 5 years data.

4. And the easiest way for a girl to get through a job is to befriend the placement guys from any of the teams. Even if she has a strong background in degree, it doesn't stand a chance unless she is beautiful and knows how to use her beauty and flirt nature.

5. Most girls in the campus find their boyfriends. If they had a boyfriend earlier, they do a break-up. Many often they marry and live happily ever after (or pretend to even if they are not happy).

6. The second category of girls decide to get the top jobs at any cost. The one who got into a top job in my senior group married her boss.

The last are the average looking girls who get placement in second or third lot with lesser package. We are told we don't socialize since we don't drink like the drunkards or wear revealing clothes or flirt. At same time, we don't have the IIT or top graduate degree either. So we don't have a chance to fit in to corporate jobs quickly. So we have to keep working hard in entire life. Marriage is the easier way out.

Average guys without looks face most difficult job interviews. Yes:looks matter. So does your age and work experience. People think that experienced folks get more offers. Reality is that hirers love young people. It is easier for them to mould.

What you see in newspapers - the crore-plus salaries - are not for PGP students, but for PGPX graduates. And they are the result of conversion from dollars to rupees, including several one-time bonuses and other inflationary tactics. Don't be misled. Be aware of what's happening; IIMA publishes its placement reports in a clear and lucid format on its website.

As a PGP, I'm expected by several people to be swimming in banknotes the day I get a job - not happening. FFS, I took a loan of 2 million (nearly 30k USD) to pay for these two years. If anything, I'll be living on a tight budget while I pay back that money. The story is different for some performers at either end of the salary spectrum, but the picture in reality is quite different from what the dimwitted media shows you.

A little more about the work that goes into getting a job. (For the rest of this answer, when I say job, I mean summer internship; and placement refers to the placement for the same.)

You have to prepare a "master CV" - a repository of all your CV points, which typically runs from 5 to over 15 pages, depending on your educational background, work experience, extra-curriculars and so on. Based on this, you prepare up to seven one-page variants of a CV - the creatively named "one-pagers".

You spend a few weeks running around campus, getting these one-pagers reviewed by your seniors based on a hazy assumption that because they got into some top-notch I-bank or consult firm, they will be quite suited for the task. Never mind the fact that you probably have more work experience than them, or that your master CV itself is less than two pages long, with your one-pagers having less variation than cheap Chinese knockoffs - CV reviews!

Then come the mock GDs - moderated by seniors, again, with the hope that they know a thing or two about GDs that you don't. Fortunately, these are not mandatory;people only attend them because "everyone else is, and I have to practice participating in GDs" (I always had to resist the urge to laugh at that excuse. It's a discussion, all you have to do is speak!) I never attended a mock GD or interview, and I was none the worse off for it.