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...

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...

It was only a month after I graduated when I got stressed because of being unable to land up with a job. I had been looking for job throughout the final year but efforts went in vane. Having passed all the 8 hurdles, I mean the semesters, I was expecting at least one good offer in hand before graduating. Well, any above average student would expect that to happen but life just doesn't work the way we want. Somehow, after a pathetic final year I gained my senses and started seeing things normally. [Pathetic doesn't refer to academics; I have always been academically strong; one of the top contenders.] With no single company visiting the campus for us (the mechanical engineers) and my hilarious interview with Wipro [shall write a separate post on that!], the only way out of the misery of bad placements was the off-campus. But, if getting a job through campus is difficult then getting job off-campus is even more difficult especially when you don't have any uncle or...