Prepping for Placements in 2020

The million dollar question. This comes from a student at one of the colleges I taught at recently.

“How do you think the placement season will be? How can we train ourselves during this time to have better chances?”

1. Things are going to be really bad this year. There’s no point in beating around the bush. You’ll be lucky to get placed, and even luckier to get a really good, high paying job. I don’t mean to be discouraging, but it is best we go into this season eyes wide open.
2. That being said, let’s think about the second question more carefully, because there are things that I would recommend:
   1. I say this every placement season, but it is even more important this year. First, beware the streetlight effect. Second, never play cricket with Sachin Tendulkar.
   2. What is the streetlight effect? Here’s Wikipedia on the subject, but the gist is people search in the easiest, most obvious place. In an interview, that place is your CV.
   3. When, in an interview, you hand the interviewer your CV, it is literally the most perfect example there can be of the streetlight effect. The interviewer doesn’t know you from Adam (or Eve), and will therefore begin to ask you questions basis stuff you’ve written in your CV.
   4. Therefore, possess the ability to speak – thoroughly, meaningfully and concisely – about every single word on your CV.
      1. Thoroughly means you should know, and I mean really know, every single project, subject and achievement you have listed. No faffing!
      2. Meaningfully means you should be able to answer how a business might benefit because of the work you have done, or the topic you have learnt, or the internship you did. “I did XYZ in my internship” is a bad answer. “The business was able to achieve ABC, because of  I doing XYZ” is a good answer.
      3. Concisely means you should leave the interviewer with the feeling that you know what you’re talking about, but you shouldn’t overburden the listener with an endless stream of sentences. Practice by saying what you want to about a project, and then try to repeat the explanation in literally half the time. Keep at it!
   5. So if you are going to be subjected to the streetlight effect during an interview, be prepared for it. Or, and even better, give the interviewer something other than your CV to talk about.
   6. Which brings me to the most important thing you can do right now, and it not training yourself. It is training others.
      1. You’re not going to be the only one saying I did a course on Coursera | I learnt MS Excel | I did project XYZ with firm PQR
      2. But you could end up being the only one saying I taught kids in my society math using videos from 3Blue1Brown | I taught my batchmates Excel, and so learnt it better | I mentored a bunch of people online on <insert subject of your choice here>
      3. I’ll say this more concisely. Try and utilize this time to do, not learn. It is vastly underrated.
   7. Which brings me to my final point, about never playing cricket with Sachin Tendulkar. Here’s what I mean: if I ever met Sachin, and got to be in a contest with him, I would have to be stark raving mad to choose a contest involving bat and ball. But I’m fairly confident I can beat him in, say, a quiz on economics.
      What is the point? The point is that in an interview about analytics, for example, good luck trying to be better than the interviewer on machine learning algorithms. That is literally that person’s job! With your experience, learning and age, it’s like playing cricket with Sachin. But what if the interviewer learns that you put up videos on, say, photography, and you have been doing so for three months? And that of the 100 videos you shared, 50 got more than 10,000 views? And that you got to interact with people the world over as a consequence? You didn’t learn a course. Instead, you put yourself out there, you shipped a product that other people could benefit from, you were a mentor to other people. Now Sachin is playing your sport – and your chances just got a whole lot better. (Example: my CV is this blog, not a piece of paper)
3. So my advice would be to identify a skill at which you are genuinely good, and to teach other people that skill, in public. Blogs, YouTube videos, Zoom sessions, whatever. Make that your CV, and crack that interview.

I hope this helps! Thank you to said student for asking the question, and if anybody has any follow-up queries, don’t hesitate to write in.

Cheers!

Author: Ashish

Blogger. Occasional teacher. Aspiring writer. Legendary procrastinator. View all posts by Ashish