NITW Campus Placements

Last Thursday, I went to my alma mater – NIT Warangal to conduct campus interviews for my employer. I went with seven other people that included two people from HR.

We started at 6am in the morning in an air-conditioned mini Swaraj Mazda. Had the number of people been around five, we would have probably gone in a Qualis. The 250 km journey was quite eventless and we reached the university by 9:30am. We were greeted by the Training and Placement officer – Prof. I.A.K Reddy. We were supposed to start the pre-placement talk by 9:45am, so we had around 15 minutes to relax a bit.

Prof. Reddy hadn’t recognized me when we shook hands, and it was only when he was reading out the names of the interview panel to all the students that he actually did. When he read Siddharth Uppal, Senior Member Technical at the dais, he looked up at the students, and then backwards towards me. He expressed surprise on how much I have changed since my days at the college. It was a pleasant feeling.

Well, the pre-placement talk was followed by a written test on the basis of which we short-listed 10 students. We divided ourselves into two panels of 4 each and decided to interview 5 students via each panel. We broke for lunch after interviewing one candidate as it was already 12:30pm by then. We continued interviewing after lunch and were done with all the interviews by 5:45pm in the evening.

We finally made offers to three students, one of whom was Anubhav Kaushal. I knew him when I was still in college and know for a fact that he always mentioned my employer as his dream company. It is good to know that he has been able to achieve that.

Interviewing fresh graduates was an interesting experience, but due to my lack of experience, I felt a little exhausted by the time my panel finished interviewing the third candidate. Many students were quite nervous because it was the first interview for them so we had to often put in some extra effort to make the candidate comfortable before we grilled him with questions.

Prof. Reddy met me around 3-4 times during the entire day, and kept saying how much I had changed from being a studious-looking and thin boy in those days. Well, I am not sure but this could all be because of the enormous quantity of coke I drink at office each day, and due to the fact that I never liked the mess food at college much!