The last week has been a crazy rollercoaster ride of uncertainty, anxiety and euphoria that is a part and parcel of every B-school: it was time for the eternal saga called the “placement week”! If you thought MBA entrance exams were competitive, think again! It’s a jungle out there and it doesn’t get any worse than it did in the last few days…
The best of friends, room mates and study partners were suddenly pitted against each other in a vicious onslaught- with every passing GD, the battle just got tougher as we all vied for the top brands and the best profiles. You name the company, we had them on campus trying to snap up the best talent! In a stiff competition where every round is an elimination stage and one small mistake meant that you were out of your dream organization, we got the taste of the real dog-eat-dog world out there. As each shortlist was announced it brought about whoops of joy among the successful candidates and moved the rest to tears- the pain of rejection was never so acute as it was in these days! Somehow we all lost our sense of proportion; we forgot that it was only 2 months of summer internship and not the end of a journey; that there were more important things in life than a project which will eventually end up as a passing reference in our CVs! Granted it was the first stepping stone to the corporate world for most of the students- freshers (mostly toppers) from top colleges who had always had it easy! I can’t even imagine how much worse it can get during the final placements- not a pretty picture! But at the end of the day, a majority of the batch was placed and the remaining were sure to be placed in the next couple of days, and thankfully we all came back to our senses, as we celebrated (mostly in relief) our collective success- peace restored and sanity regained!
As for me, I was more of a bemused spectator in this mad mad world- unlike many of the brilliant people here, I have a relatively humble background, I am used to rejections and I was mentally prepared to be one of the last students to be placed…as it is, being a Finance student, we were warned that we would have a tough time! Also, I don’t have an exactly glittering record of conversions in GDs, so I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular! But as luck would have it, I became one of the first students to be placed in a dream company- Deloitte Consultancy, one of the top 4 consultancy firms in the world, and also the highest paid! I couldn’t believe anybody would be as stupid as to pay me such obscene amount of money for 2 months! But there you go, now I come with the Symbiosis tagline, though I am as smart (or as dumb) as I was three months ago. Having said that, it was my dream profile and I deserved to get through: the selection criteria was tailor made for me: 18-page written case analysis, two rounds of interviews (one of which involved a random case study with no data) but no GD! It happened well before the placement week, so I was practically free during the week itself. But I think I was very lucky and I am deeply thankful- I am not exceptional, nor am I any better than most of my batchmates: I just happened to get the right break at the right time! And probably I was sensible enough to know that while it was important, it was just a small part of my life…
