the e^xponential stress

This is in continuation of part one - How I Messed Up My First Interviews: Chapter I It was December 1st, the 'Day 1' of the 2015 placements, and Honda R&D happened to be the second company to have come after Microsoft. We were 4 students from the batch who opted for the Honda interviews. After a hiatus from my previous interview experience during engineering, I thought that this time I was prepared and would have learned something. I was excited for the interview although not much excited because I wasn't into two-wheelers as much as I was into cars. In a batch of 20 M.Des students at IIT Delhi, I too was amongst the 5 people who wanted to become an automobile designer. In our multi-disciplinary course, we studied product design for both tangible products as well as for digital products. We worked closely with Maruti Suzuki India R&D for more than 6 months and learned the entire process of car design right from research to clay modelling, but despite our efforts an...

I have messed up my first interviews in both colleges that I attended. Today, I will speak of the first one that I gave. I have written about this in two of my earlier posts- Engineering is a state of mind , and Group discussions and introversion . I wasn't sure earlier if I should write this or not but I do feel that failures are an important part of life and I sport them confidently. And, for the past 2.5 years of my career, I have been sitting on the other side of the table, hiring others for my company and I have grown a lot since then so, this post wouldn't hurt my career. Here it is- My interview experience with Wipro. This story dates back to December 2012. Wipro was one of the first few companies that visited our campus and like I always do, I cleared all the prelims and was amongst the few who got qualified for the interview pushing back many ECE, IT, and CSE grads despite I being from the mechanical branch.  I got my formals stitched for the first time in life, clean...

This post has been pending for years now. Ever since I finished post-graduation, I have got little more time for myself, time to read books again and enjoy the solitude. This article is going to cover my experiences with GDs (Group Discussions) and how I dealt with them. Not sure if this can qualify to be a tutorial post of "How to nail GDs?" or "How introverts can speak in GDs?" I'm a person who doesn't speak much, and when there's a group chat, I don't like to talk at all! I like to be in solitude. In short, I'm an introvert. Therefore, Group Discussion is a parameter that can't filter out persons like me for a job during the placement/selection process. Whether Group Discussion is a correct parameter to select candidates or not is a different topic and I won't talk about it. During my engineering, I sat for almost ten GDs (all were not for placements-some were practice GDs while some were with friends) and the funny part is tha...

Qualifying CEED is not enough to get admission in M.Des. The admission process of reputed institutes is quite exhaustive and tests candidates' aptitude at several stages, DAT and Interview. Here, I'm sharing my experience of the interviews at IDC (Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay) during March'14. I was lucky to be called for interviews of all the three disciplines I applied for. Visual Communication Interview: I am a product designer by passion. I had no VC work to show except a collection of my cartoons- my free-time fun and my second passion. I guess, I should have applied for Animation Design with my cartoons but I didn't do so because I wasn't sure of getting placed after studying Animation.  VC! My first meeting with professors of an IIT. The panel didn't seem interested, because of my portfolio? Who knows? They asked me to show the best three works of mine.   "Sir, all are my best. You can see any of these," I said. ...