Interview: Leadership, soft skills key to dream job, says IIT Kanpur student who bagged Rs 2-cr offer

Working in multi-national companies is a dream of every student, that’s why students go all out throughout the year to give their best shot when it comes to campus placements. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, which has resulted in thousands of job losses, several IITians received whopping salary packages in 2021.

Shiksha.com interviewed one such student from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur who has been offered a package of USD 2,74,000 (appox. INR 2.04 crore) per annum from Uber USA. 

Muskan Garg, who has a major degree in mechanical engineering and a minor degree in industrial and management engineering, talks about her placement preparation that can surely help you get your first job. Scroll down to read the complete interview. 

Q. Could you please give us a perspective of what the placement season is about and how one should prepare to counter the challenges ahead?

A. I think placement season is about getting your dream job, deciding where you would like to be in the upcoming years and seeing yourself contribute to the real world. 

A perfect blend of knowledge, confidence, soft skills, and ofcourse, leadership qualities are required for cracking the interviews. 

Q. Do you need to separately prepare for the interviews in spite of being good at academics?

A. Definitely. Although throughout our college years, we develop a lot of soft skills but academics are not the only thing one has to be good at. One of the major points that I feel plays a vital role is how good of a team player a person is and what sort of leadership qualities does one have. Both of these qualities can be developed as well as reflected with the group projects or individual projects or by taking up several positions of responsibilities. 

Q. Could you please give a step-by-step guide for placement preparation?

A. First and foremost thing that one needs is a resume. Despite being the most basic, your resume is expected to stand out and have a killer first impression. Resume should be well formatted and should reflect all the skills one possesses that are relevant to the profiles being targeted. Getting your resume reviewed from a bunch of experienced seniors is definitely fruitful. I spent almost three days preparing my resume and then another 3-4 days getting it reviewed, iterating and re-iterating over it. You are expected to have your complete resume in hand by mid-August.

Then comes aptitude tests that start at the end of September and continue till the interview process. For these, you are supposed to be prepared beforehand. I mean once the tests start there is barely any time to spare for preparation. I started my preparation in May. I was primarily aiming for software developer roles and therefore started going through coding contests and questions on leetcode, codeforces, interviewbit. For some basic computer science fundamentals, I referred to blogs, resources from interviewbit as well as geeks for geeks. 

Q. When should a student actually start preparing for placements?

A. I believe there is no such hard and fast deadline for starting the preparation. One should definitely spend some time exploring all the domains and then decide what suits him/her the best. And once you are done with your pre-final year internship, you can completely focus on placement preparation.

Q. What are the common questions that are asked by companies during placements?

A. Most of the coding preparation sites such ascodeforces,leetcode, interviewbit, geeks for geeks cover up questions or at least similar sort of questions that are being asked in the interviews as well as tests. Going through discussion forums and top interview problems always give you an edge. 

Q. Do internships help students get a job in the industry?

A. Yes, internships do help students in getting a better job. Companies do look out for people who have already experienced working on large codebases and know how to maintain the standard and quality of code being committed to theorganisation. I have previously been anOutreachy intern where I worked directly on OCaml’s compiler, this gave me exposure on how large codebases work and how long does pull requests take to get merged.

Q. Some IITs conduct resume-making workshops to prepare students for placements. Do you think it helps?

A. Yes, resume building workshops do help. They give you an idea of what a resume should look like and what information it should contain. They give you the basic idea of what resume templates can be used and what information is relevant to which profiles.

Q.  What was the trickiest question you were asked during the interviews you have faced so far?

A. So for the second interview round of Uber, I was asked to design a trading platform. I believe it was the trickiest as I was initially supposed to gather all the requirements according to which interviewer wanted the listings to be.

Q. How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect placements at your institute? Has it changed job requirements?

A. In 2021, our institute had the best placements till date. This is also because the economy is seeing a boom and hiring for the previous batch wasn’t so large in number.

Q. What would be your suggestions to students who are planning to sit for placements this year? 

A. Have faith in yourself. Placement season is going to help you grow in ways you never thought you would. It is going to be a wholesome experience and it will be all worth it in the end. All you need to do is keep going. One of myfavouritequotes that kept me going was: “It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it everyday. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.” 

Read more:

• IITs witness record placements this year
• IIT Placements 2021: IIT Kanpur sees record number of job offers